


Short and Frequent Winters

by loosecannon, sheepknitssweater



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Captain America (Movies), Game of Thrones (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/F, F/M, Lesbian Sansa Stark, M/M, Queen Sansa, Tony Stark Has A Heart
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-09
Updated: 2019-03-30
Packaged: 2019-07-28 18:46:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 20,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16247639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loosecannon/pseuds/loosecannon, https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheepknitssweater/pseuds/sheepknitssweater
Summary: Sansa Stark walks through a portal and into the twenty-first century. The Avengers respond.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> the more astute of you may notice this was posted in part before, then taken down, by sheepknitssweater. it's the same thing! but getting longer!
> 
> you don't have to know anything about game of thrones for this to make sense.
> 
> see end notes for more warnings.

Tony awoke at dawn. He drank the lukewarm cocktail waiting on his nightstand and went back to sleep. 

When he woke again, he felt better. Pepper was sitting cross-legged on their bed, naked but for a laptop and a flannel shirt. “There’s oatmeal on the stove,” she said. When they were young and wide-arteried, it had been bacon. 

“Look at us,” he said, grinning. “We’re old!”

“Not that old.”

“I am going to put on some very expensive retinol,” he said. “Thus proving you wrong and moisturizing simultaneously.”

And then Tony’s phone made a horrible noise. Space and time had opened, almost instantaneously, in northeast Maine.

+++

It was near a weirwood, the place the sky tore. All of the trees Sansa found on the other side of the tear were faceless.

She struggled to her feet. The snow was melting here, muddy and springish; at home, it had been struck by the long freeze. Her head hurt, and there was a humming inside her ears. She ground her teeth and began to move. She could not stay. She was on cursed ground.

Sansa had been walking after a nightmare, the one where she discovered Roose Bolton’s corpse in her father’s grave. Why she was disinterring him, she had never understood: perhaps she had warged into an insect and burrowed her way into his place in the ground. This might make the dream true: since Bran had begun to teach her warging, she’d learned that her dreams were often more than dreams, that she’d been inhabiting animals for much longer than she realized. This could mean she had done some fairly awful things through animals.

The dream wasn’t true. She was going to pray, but then the sky had opened in front of her and swallowed her whole.

Sansa ran on this new ground, and then walked, and then ran again. She called out for Brienne and Arya and whatever benevolent spirits might still be here. She offered others blood and silver. She walked until her feet opened and then walked hours further. When she was a girl, Old Nan told her that if she found herself in a spirit realm to pray and to run. She did both, but not for her father, now; only for herself. 

Night fell, and then dawn, and Sansa had slumped against the wide trunk of an oak. She saw an enormous insect buzz through the sky. She could not run anymore—could no longer move, or even swallow— so she prayed. The insect landed in a nearby grove.

And then she heard the barking and whining of dogs. She could not run, or stand, or even sit, sweating mutely into the moss beneath her forehead. They found her soon enough.

The dogs were hellish creatures, cursed hounds on cursed land. Their faces were horribly distended, skin dripping from their skulls and snouts. One leaped upon her, spraying saliva from sheets of jowls. She slashed and stabbed inexpertly with her dagger until it fell. 

The other hounds bayed without pause for breath. After the hounds come the men, Sansa knew. She made a final effort to stand and found herself lying face-down in the mud. She retched. The men arrived.

They were unarmed and unarmored but for collections of metal piping. Their leader arrived after them. His armor was bright and strange, and he descended from the air with fire at his feet. 

+++

The girl sat propped against a tree. Blood slicked her face and hands. Mr. T., a sweet dog Murphy used to feed discarded hamburger buns, leaked organs into the snow beside her. He was still horribly alive, and his rolling eyes mimicked the girl’s.  _ Fuck _ .

“My name is Alayne,” she announced. “I am a small woman and of no use to you.” She was not, in fact, small, nearing six feet in height. 

“Okay, Alayne,” Tony said, too fast and too loud. He softened his speech. “Hello. My name’s Tony.”

“There is nothing to be gained from talking to me.” Her dress—what remained of it, anyway; most of the fabric was shredded and stained—was long, heavy, and embroidered.  _ High medieval northern Europe _ , the art history textbook Pepper had left face-down on their bed supplied. The girl looked like a refugee from a catastrophic Renaissance faire. It was possible, Tony realized, that she was a refugee from the actual Renaissance. “I am very ill,” she said in one breath. “If you touch me, you, too, will become diseased.”

Soft and slow, Tony reminded himself. She was clearly terrified, eyes flickering like she was a possessed doll in a cheap horror film. The impression wasn’t helped by the pallor and the costume. “We have medicine,” he said. “We can make you better.” Shit. Way too ominous.

“No, thank you.”

Tony sighed. “I’m gonna be real with you,” he said. “You need to come with us. We won’t hurt you, but we need to know if you have any… sickness that people here would die from.”

Tony whispered instructions to JARVIS:  _ bring the chopper close. Alayne doesn’t look like she can walk very far. _

“I don’t want to hurt you,” she said, “or your men.” Bold claim, he thought, from someone with nothing but a concussion and an ornamental knife. Tony told himself not to be perverse. “But if any of you touch me, I will kill you. I am a warg, and there is a great stag nearby.”

“Okay,” said Tony slowly. He could ask about the incomprehensible features of her world later. “If you don’t want to be touched, I respect that. But you need to come with us.” 

“No.”

This girl, Alayne, was not going into a helicopter by her free will. Tony hated this part. 

“Alright,” he said. “Murphy, Harris.” He gestured to the two men. “Like ripping off a bandaid.” 

Murphy took her by the armpits. She screamed. Harris tried to take her legs, but she kicked with desperate violence, aiming for the head. When he hauled her knees over his shoulders, her skirt fell back. Tony caught a glimpse of orange pubic hair and looked away.

Should he reach out and fix her skirt? Who should fix her skirt? The girl’s expression was changing, impossibly quickly, from terror to anguish to rage.

Before Tony could do anything at all, Alayne fainted.

+++

Sansa saw through the stag’s wide-set eyes. Its antlers weighed heavy like a crown. She launched into a drunken four-legged sprint.

The bearded man, dense and shorter than she (they were always shorter), looked up. She speared him through the abdomen as he stood clutching her inert, half-clothed body.

She made it several bounds before the stag died, and she found herself, in the twin agonies of animal death and human illness, back within her body.

Screaming. A pin-prick stab. A slow trickle of sleep. Then sleep.

+++

Murphy muscled the sedated girl into the chopper, tears streaming down his face. The poor guy was only 28, and Harris’d been in his unit in Afghanistan.

Harris had been 30 and subdued. Tony was struck by the memory of his having a collection of Garfield paraphernalia, which would bring another kind of person to tears.

Tony looked at Harris’s bleeding body, dead beyond a shadow of a doubt. Slowly, he switched on his headset. “Widow,” he said, “you need to get the fuck over here.”

+++

“Widow” was a small woman with large breasts. Sansa wondered what mechanism held them immobile and apart. Something with bone, perhaps, or boiled leather. 

Sansa ought to be afraid. She knew this, but all she could feel was tired. She examined the end of her braid. And then Widow was in front of her, speaking blurrily. She had an old face. 

“Alayne?” she said. “I’m trying to keep the guys from sedating you again, but you gotta walk with me. And gotta go into that thing.” She pointed at the metal insect, shining and huge, that had descended from above the treeline.

“You’re a widow?” Sansa slurred. Her tongue was wrong.

“Yep.”

“I am too. Pride in it.”

Widow laughed. “I’m personally very proud of my marital status.”

Sansa was quiet for a time. She watched Widow’s face. It was a real face, hard and sad. The face of a human woman trapped amongst spirits. “You’re stuck here...too?”

This time it wasn’t a real laugh Widow gave. She said, “ha,” and then, “yeah, I’m stuck here.” 

Sansa nodded. Widow grabbed her arm and put it around her shoulders. Sansa stumbled, half-atop her, into the insect’s belly.

**+++**

“What was his name?” Alayne’s eyes were pink and glassy, her throat moving convulsively. They had landed in the Hoboken not-hospital Tony had built, but hated using. Somehow, a place that looked like a house but smelled like protracted death was worse than a place that looked and smelled the same. She was in a chair (refused the bed), in her own clothes (refused the gown), in her own faculties after the industrial-strength barbiturates wore off. Natasha had castigated Tony for those in a whisper that was much scarier than a yell.

Tony had planned to tell Alayne grim fictions about Harris. Twin baby girls and a pregnant wife. He’d wanted her to feel the gut-rot of true guilt. Looking at her now, that seemed childish and cruel. 

“What was his name?” she said again, louder. 

“Hey,” Tony said. “Hey, hey, you don’t need to know that now. Give it a week.”

“You’re joking,” she said, dead-throated. “I killed him.” 

“His name was Max Harris,” Tony conceded. “Good guy.” 

“I will make reparations.” She’s a kid, thought Tony. Christ, she’s a kid.

They were silent for a long while. Alayne breathed loudly but did not cry. It was not a comfortable silence, so he spoke: “The dog’s name was Mr. T.”

Now her face went pink with rage. “A man is dead by my hand,” she said, “and you’re talking about a  _ dog? _ ”

“Excuse me,” Tony said. “I thought it was possible to care about more than one thing at a time. My mistake.” He was getting angry again. Mr. T was Harris’s favorite dog, and it was easier to think about the dying animal than the dying man. God, but he’d been sort of stupid. Kind and stupid and dead. Tony realized he was thinking, now, about dog and man both.

She glowered. “Dogs eat men.”

“And you impale them.” Tony regretted the words as they left his mouth, but the girl didn’t look too upset. She did seem somewhat stunned. “I’m really sorry,” Tony said. “That was a terrible thing to say.”

She cleared her throat. “You’re right,” she said, not specifying what he was right about. Then she met his eyes. “Excuse me. I should rest.”

“Yeah,” Tony said, “of course.” As he left, the door closed with the heavy click of eight different high-security locks.

+++

Tony felt ill. He was drunk and wanted to be drunker. “Pepper, babe, can I have some Ativan?”

She clicked into the bedroom, old enough to call them “pumps” and young enough to wear them. 

“Only if you tell me why.”

“I really fucked up with the portal girl.” 

“How so?”

Tony held out his hand, palm skyward. “Fine,” said Pepper. She looked back at him and decided that he needed assurance that she wasn’t mad. They knew each other too well. “The things I do for love,” she said, and dropped three pills into his open hand. “Now tell me what’s wrong.”

“I really fucked up with the portal girl.” 

“Did you attempt to fix the situation?” said Pepper, attempting to fix the situation. “I told you just to be sympathetic.” 

“Worse, Pep.  _ Significantly  _ worse.”

“Did you cut off her hair for my extensions?”

“On par.” Tony paused. “I got really mad and told her that she impales people.”

“Well, she does.”

“She was going to make reparations to Harris’s family. She  _ said  _ ‘reparations.’”

“All he’s got is that dog, though, right?”

“She killed his dog first.”

“Christ.”

“But she’s a kid, Pepper. And she thinks that all dogs eat people, I think, which might actually be true where she’s from. She thought it was self-defense.”

Pepper wordlessly shifted the blankets and sat cross-legged against the wall. Tony breathed against her thigh. She ran long painted fingertips through his hair.

“I don’t think she’s an idiot,” Pepper said finally. “And I don’t think she cares very much what you think. She would feel guilty no matter what you said.”

“I said the wrong thing, though.”

“You are a melancholic middle-aged billionaire with very little experience talking to teenage girls. That’s a good thing.”

“You gonna give me a sticker?”

“I’ll track one down.”

+++

They were moving her into Stark Tower, where they could better ensure her cocktail of recently preventable illnesses wouldn’t spread to every other person in the tri-state area. No sedatives: just a tinted-windowed SUV, doors that Natasha knew had child-lock enabled. Alayne was methodically pressing buttons and prying at openings. She produced yet another dagger and tried to break the window with it. The driver, Alexander, gave her a look.

“It’s just bone,” Natasha told him. “Let her keep it.” Nat understood the resourcefulness of prisoners. If they took the knife, she would find another weapon. “The safer she feels, the safer we all are.”

Alayne seemed to have realized that the car was sturdier than she. Her eyes were closed. She appeared to be sleeping, or meditating, or pretending she was already dead.

They arrived, the doors unlocked, and Alayne slid out of the car and climbed atop a  _ horse, _ which appeared to be  _ waiting for her. _

“Out, out,” Natasha said, climbing into the front seat. Alexander looked sort of shell-shocked; he drove armored vehicles, but rarely the kind that  _ needed _ their armor. “Just let me do it. Move over.”

Natasha hadn’t lost sight of Alayne, and she managed to thread the car through New York traffic after her. Alayne was  _ riding the horse _ , which had a  _ carriage harness  _ hanging from its neck. It appeared to have chewed through its tethers, at the cost of heavily bleeding gums.

Alayne took off into Central Park, mortally terrifying a group of Finnish tourists. Natasha jumped out of the car, cut loose a Citi bike, and continued her pursuit, pedaling furiously.

They cornered her—Natasha and three other (female) agents—by Bethesda fountain. Alayne seemed to consider trampling them with the horse, but probably remembered that she had already killed somebody in the past 48 hours and paused. That was all it took for Hill to tranquilize the horse and apologetically handcuff Alayne.

“I’m not doing this for the sake of it,” she told her. “You really just need to get vaccinated. Then you can go wherever, okay? You’re not our prisoner.”

This was not true. Natasha gave Alayne a look that said,  _ that was not true _ . She had made the decision not to lie to her, a decision she made about very few people. But everyone else had been lying to Alayne, and would continue to do so: she deserved one piece of honesty.

+++

Widow explained to Sansa that the needles were meant to make her better, that no one would come into the room while Sansa was unclothed, that Sansa could have any food she liked and Widow would eat it, too, if she wanted proof it didn’t have anything in it. Sansa had bread and water, lying in a hard bed suspended on absurdly thin poles that moved of their own volition. All the furniture here had strange surfaces and seemed half-alive. All the people seemed half-dead.

“My name isn’t really Alayne,” she told Widow. For now, she wasn’t sweating with fever, and she was coming to a terrible realization:

She hadn’t been captured by enemies of her family or of the North. She had been captured by people to whom the North meant nothing.

Nothing.

“I figured,” Widow said.

“Are you really called Widow?”

Widow laughed loudly. “Sometimes,” she said. “I’m Natasha Romanoff.”

“Are you a lady or a smallwoman?” Sansa asked, wracking her brain for a title.

“Neither, I guess.”

Sansa wondered, briefly, what such a person should be called. She settled on the simple surname. Romanoff. It was less strange than many things here.

Time pooled and trickled in this windowless room. The man Tony appeared. “Hey,” he said. “We gotta talk.”

Widow—Romanoff—gave him a blank look. “Tony.”

“Nat, we  _ need  _ to talk now. You can stay with her, if she wants—“

“She,” Romanoff hissed, “is right here. And she’s got ears and a brain between them. And if this is another guilt trip about a fucking dog—”

“I can’t open the portal.”

Sansa spoke. “What do you mean?”

“Okay, so. You came from this world to our world through a portal—it’s like a passageway that sometimes connects different realities—and this one only goes one way.”

“You can’t go home,” Widow translated. “The door is shut.”

Sansa was silent. Her eyes swelled but did not spill. She extended her neck and lifted her chin. “It only works from my world to yours.” Her breath felt wrong.

Tony nodded. He was a small man—smaller even than Ramsay. Joffrey-sized, and old. Sansa thought, unbidden, of how easy he would be to kill. How many weapons were within arm’s reach. 

“Alayne?” There must have been something in her eyes that Romanoff recognized.

“I’m sorry,” Tony said. “This is probably the worst thing that could happen to anyone, and I’m so, so sorry.” He paused. “I tried so hard, Alayne. I really did.”

And, with that, her hate evaporated. It began to condensate into grief. “Can you go, please,” she asked of Romanoff and Tony. Before they left, though, she told them, “my name is Sansa Stark.” They only nodded.

She listened for their retreating footsteps. When she could no longer hear them, she let out a wet and silent scream.

+++

Tony enjoyed grouping people into twos. “There are two kinds of people,” he told Pepper on a bi-weekly basis. At home, after his visit with Sansa, he philosophized that those two kinds were as such: those who, if they kept a diary, would find their lives more depressing upon reading it, and those who would find it less. He lived solidly in the “more” category, stealing from his own liquor cabinet, the only one aware that he could be 50% smarter than himself were he ever sober. He wondered which category poor slack-faced Sansa Stark was in: if, were she to pay closer attention to her past and future, she would find herself grateful or angry.

Neither of them was adept at doing nothing. Nothing, for Tony, meant thinking about who he was: a so-called philanthropist eroding someone else’s liver with a third already paid for. For Sansa Stark, it probably meant, more than anything else, grief and terror. Everyone in her life was, effectively, dead. Maybe she saw herself as effectively dead, too. Her future was flashing light and weary strangers pretending to be kind, some cynic’s vision of the afterlife.

Pepper found Sansa an apartment on the Upper East Side, which seemed as close to a royal medieval stronghold as any New York neighborhood was likely to be.

“One bedroom, one bath, security to your most stringent specifications,” Pepper told Tony. “The kind of surveillance the FBI has wet dreams about putting on Barnes and Rogers.”

“Perfect,” Tony said.

+++

Tony gave her chambers in what appeared to be a wealthy compound. She was starting to pick up on the otherworld’s status symbols: every tooth white and in place, pleasing color combinations in dress, jewelry, and shoe. 

Every woman in her compound had piercings in their ears, with which they hung more jewelry. Sansa dropped a pin into a bottle of whiskey, fished it out, and put it through her earlobes. 

She felt calmer afterward, so she stuck the pin into her ears several times more. 

Later, a man and a woman in well-tailored dark wool knocked on her door. She undid the bolt and let them in, unsurprised. Widow had mentioned that ambassadors from the otherworld’s army may appear, and that she would not have much choice but to obey them. 

The woman outstretched her hand. “Hello, Miss Stark.” That title was incorrect—here, wives and widows were called “Mrs.” Sansa did not correct her. 

“My name is Joanne Gable,” the woman said, and then gestured toward the man. “And this is Hank Greene.” 

“Welcome in.”

“Thank you”

Joanne was too loud, and Hank too staring. They told her that the cost of her arrival and medicine were enormous, and that she had to work off that debt. A low trick that little crumbling lords used to secure servants.  _ At least they think I’m stupid, _ Sansa thought. She could not afford to be indignant.

“We understand,” Joanne Gable said, “that you are accustomed to a more affluent lifestyle. And you will be doing good work. So you’ll have a salary of one thousand dollars per week.”

Sansa nodded. 

She was to warg into small animals and spy on ten different places of worship. They handed her several small metal items. 

“Recording devices,” Joanne said. “Clip them onto the animals that you—” She paused.

“Warg,” Sansa said.

“Okay, warg. The recording device is because a lot of conversions you might overhear will be in different languages.”

Sansa nodded.

“Do you have any questions?”

“No. Thank you for your company.”

+++

Natasha visited the empty, awful apartment. Sansa was sitting on the couch, her sole piece of furniture, embroidering what looked like a hat.

“You’ve gotta get out of here,” Natasha said. “It’s enough to make anyone miserable.”

Sansa narrowed her eyes. “According to the medicinewomen,” she said dubiously, “I’m not fit to work for another month.”

“You’re in New York City.” When this didn’t land, Natasha tried again. “There’s more to do than work. Do you know anyone other than me and Tony?”

The look Sansa gave her could’ve permanently leveled the self-esteem of a second-grader.

“Okay,” Natasha said. “I think you need to meet someone other than me or Tony.”

Sansa gave no indication that she had even heard Natasha. It was lucky that suppressing visible signs of frustration was Natasha’s primary job, because otherwise, she would be in serious trouble. Natasha seemed to surround herself with frustrating people, by choice and otherwise.

Frustrating people.

_ Wait _ .

“Actually,” Natasha said, “there’s somebody I think you might get along with.”

+++

Sansa’s mother had always told her that the best cure for seasickness was closing your eyes and holding your head as still as you could. Now, she laid her head in her hands every time they put her in the car, a vehicle that produced something worse than seasickness. 

The consequence of this was that Sansa rarely knew where she was, or where anything else was relative to her. She knew she lived somewhere north and east, and Romanoff had told her this tavern was someplace called Brooklyn, which was, she imagined, also in the city.

The driver, to his credit, gave her privacy: hers wasn’t a terribly elegant posture. Romanoff, on the other hand, seemed not to grasp the concept of polite silence. “Are you alright?” she asked.

“Yes,” Sansa said, putting all of her energy into relaxing her jaw, making the word even and smooth and untroubled. “Thank you.”

Romanoff didn’t say anything else. Sansa could hear her iPhone making sounds. Occasionally, Romanoff grunted or sighed or huffed a laugh.

“Miss Stark,” the driver said, holding open her door, and she looked up: the car had stilled without her realizing. Stilled, not stopped: everything here ended without any sort of follow-through.

“Thank you very much,” she said, and stepped out, carefully, onto the concrete. It was a gray day, not yet raining.

“You’re sure about this?” Natasha asked before the car left. Sansa didn’t feel the need to dignify this, a non-question, with a response.

Inside, everything has been painted the horrible screaming yellow so popular here. The seats were red and seemed to be made of very poorly tanned leather.

“There he is,” Romanoff said, touching Sansa’s elbow and nodding toward one of the only men in the tavern. He was as broad as the Hound, but had the smooth skin and hair of a woman or child. He was turning a mug of something dark in small circles by its handle. “Steve,” Romanoff called, and he looked up.

His face shifted very quickly from a blank and somewhat wide-eyed expression to a smile. “Well, hi,” he said. He stood up, and wasn’t, to Sansa’s relief, any shorter than her. Joffrey, Ramsey, and Littlefinger all despised tilting their faces to look at her. She could meet his eyes without lifting her chin. “I’m Steve Rogers. Or—just Steve. It’s really great to meet you.” He stuck his hand out. She placed hers in it, which seemed, briefly, to confuse him.

“Hello,” she said. “My name is Sansa Stark. It is a pleasure to meet you, too."

He kept standing for a moment, smiling, seemingly unsure of where to put his hands. Eventually, Romanoff patted him on the shoulder. “Alright,” she said, nodding at Sansa. “I’ll leave you two to it. Sansa, you know how to reach me, with the phone?”

Sansa took extreme care not to let her eyes bulge out of her head or her jaw drop.  _ Leaving Sansa with a strange man  _ didn’t seem to concern Romanoff. Sansa looked at her sharply, thinning her lips, but Romanoff seemed not to notice. “Sansa?”

“Yes,” Sansa said effortfully. She stripped and burned Romanoff with her eyes. 

Romanoff turned, apparently oblivious, to Steve. “See you later, Cap. Tell Barnes I’m kicking his ass next week.”

“Yeah, I’m not getting between you two on this one,” he said, his smile relaxing briefly. “Buck says dirty wins don’t count as wins."

“Glass  _ houses _ ,” Romanoff exclaimed, then nudged him and nodded at Sansa again, then  _ left _ .

They stood for a moment, Steve’s face wooden again, Sansa willing herself to breathe evenly. “Okay,” Steve finally said, clapping his hands together. “Um. Is this seat okay? Or would you rather somewhere else? I usually do the corner, but,” and he trailed off, seeming to lose direction for the sentence.

“Yours is a good place,” Sansa said, though the strange table, bolted to the floor, made it very difficult to slide into the seat without damaging her skirts. 

Steve didn’t speak for a moment. He drank from his mug. When he saw Sansa looking, he asked, apologetic, “oh, do you want coffee? Or—here, I can get you the menu.”

“No,” Sansa replied quickly. When Steve didn’t respond, she continued, cautiously, “coffee is fine." That was, she guessed, the dark liquid.

She had guessed right: the server poured it from a black kettle into her mug, and it had a strong, slightly nauseating smell. The server also refilled Steve’s mug, which he had already drained. He looked embarrassed by this.

“So,” he said. “Nat told me—I mean, I don’t know anything about you, really, of course. But she told me you…”

“I’m not of this world,” Sansa said.

“Yeah. Exactly. Probably Nat told  _ you  _ this, but I’m not either. I was asleep for seventy years, so it’s pretty different. Not as different,” he amended, “but it was hard for me to adjust, too.”

To avoid responding, Sansa sipped the drink. It was very bitter. She sipped it anyway.

“I’m really lucky,” Steve continued. “My friend from before, Bucky, he’s… He’s still around, too.” He looked at her a little frantically. “I can’t imagine how hard this would be without him here with me."

The server refilled Sansa's mug, which she had finished.

“Or, I can,” he went on, looking sad as well as unaccountably petrified. “For the first couple years, he wasn’t with me. He was—well, anyway. It was awful, just awful.”

With a twinge, Sansa remembered Audhild. Almost, but not quite, a lover—as close as Sansa could stand to come to that kind of love.

Sansa banished the thought from her mind. She was becoming, irrationally, upset, and knew those memories would only upset her further.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m talking so much about myself. How are you doing with everything?”

“I am well.” Sansa's hands were shaking, her heart twisted and submerged. “Excuse me,” she said, then stood and walked to the privy, which she had identified before they sat.

Once she had locked the door, Sansa sank to her knees, back against the wall. Her breath burned coming in and going out. She tried to straighten her dress and found she couldn’t move, pinned by some crushing invisible weight. She felt blood moving in each one of her veins.

Time slurred. Audhild’s tongue moved across the gap between her front teeth. Bran, four years old, wept over a broken toy. Ramsey kicked her in the side.

A knock. “Miz Stark,” Steve’s voice said, muffled, “are you alright?”

And this world, it turned out, was worse than any memory could be, more absurd than any dream.  _ Miz Stark _ . What was “Miz?” “Yes, thank you,” Sansa gritted out.

For a moment, Steve said nothing, though she didn’t hear him walking away. Finally, he asked, “are you sure?”

“I am,” Sansa said, though this time, the words were punctuated by a particularly harsh vocalized gasp.

Another pause. “I’m—is it, would you mind, if I called Nat?”

The answer to that question required more than three words. Sansa said nothing.

“Miz Stark?”

“No,” she said, because it was better than trying to muddle through a real response.

“Okay,” Steve said. “Okay.” He didn’t leave. “Hi, Nat,” Steve said. “Miz Stark is, um,” and then she finally heard him pace away.

The reprieve was brief. “Sansa?” Romanoff said. “Can I come in?”

Sansa wanted, momentarily, to break Romanoff’s nose, or something similar. “No,” she said.

“Please,” Romanoff said. “I swear to God, I’ll get out fast. Can you just let me in for a minute?”

Sansa squeezed her eyes shut. Finally, she reached up, with great effort and great reluctance, to unlock the door.

“Shit,” Romanoff said. She looked at Sansa appraisingly. Sansa worked very hard to cross her arms in protest.

“You’re having trouble breathing?”

It became clear that Romanoff actually expected a response to that. “Yes,” Sansa said.

“Okay, hold on,” Romanoff said. She rifled through her bag, then fished out an orange bottle. She took out a small blue tablet, which she broke in half. “Here, take this,” she said, kneeling and holding one of the halves out on her palm.

Sansa squinted in Romanoff’s general direction.

“It’ll help.”

Sansa looked at the tablet. “What is it made from?”

“Um,” Romanoff said, “chemical compounds, I guess.”

Sansa shook her head.

“Steve,” Romanoff called.

“What,” Steve said, from right outside the door.

“Can you tell her klonopin stops panic attacks?”

Steve didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he cleared his throat. “Miz Stark,” he said, “those don’t work on me, so I don’t have any experience. I’m not gonna pretend I know they’ll help.”

Romanoff rolled her eyes.

“But they help Nat,” Steve said, “and a lot of other people. And they don’t knock you out or anything, if it’s a small amount.”

His voice was soft, but not like he was speaking to a child or an animal. It was the voice soldiers used when they lay their weapons down in surrender.  _ I’m unarmed _ , he was saying.  _ If you have to kill me, do.  _ Sansa thought this was a fairly humiliating voice to use around somebody one had just met.

Romanoff turned to Sansa, who made no move to take the tablet.

“Alright then,” Romanoff said. “Do you have alcohol where you’re from?

“Yes."

“Okay, I think I have something in here.” She rattled around in the purse again, this time producing two small glass bottles containing a clear liquid. “These are alcohol,” she said.

Sansa hesitated, then reached out for one. She unscrewed the cap and drank it. The taste was vile, but unmistakably alcoholic. Perhaps, she thought, the wines here were all disgusting. It would make sense, given how horrible coffee was.

After a moment, her muscles loosened and her heart slowed. “Thank you,” she said, voice raspy from the strain.

“Don’t worry about it,” Romanoff said. She paused. “Do you want to go home?”

Sansa waited an appropriate amount of time, pretending to consider it. “Yes,” she said.

“Cool.” Romanoff stood and straightened her horrible slick jacket. “You need a minute?”

Sansa inhaled, then exhaled. A minute would only prolong the ordeal. “No,” she said, and rose from the floor.

Romanoff hit Steve with the door when she opened it. “Oh, sorry,” she said, not looking very sorry. She raised her eyebrow at him, which seemed to make him sheepish. “We’re gonna head out.”

“Yeah, sure,” Steve said. His throat clicked quietly when he swallowed. “It was really nice meeting you, Miz Stark.”

Sansa had to suppress a laugh at the difficulty with which he lied to her. “Thank you, Steve,” she said. It seemed to make him inordinately happy that she called him what he had asked her to.

It was raining, now. Romanoff groaned and found newspapers to hold over her and Sansa’s heads. They were very ineffective.


	2. Chapter 2

“What’s wrong with you?”

Steve looked up from the eggs Bucky had fried (burned) for dinner. “Huh?”

“I said what’s wrong with you,” Bucky said. “You look like there’s an insect up your ass.”

Steve glared at him; Bucky shrugged; Steve relented. “I didn’t know what I should say to the girl from the portal,” he said, finally, “but I’m pretty sure what I said was the opposite of it.”

Bucky squinted at him. “Did you tell her it gets better?”

“ _ No _ ,” Steve said. “Jesus, give me some credit.”

“Then it couldn’t have been that bad.”

“I think she had a nervous fit in the bathroom.”

“Oh,” Bucky said. “Yeah. That’s not great.”

“Like I said.”

Bucky rested his chin on his hand and looked at Steve for awhile. “You didn’t take anyone’s advice back then, did you,” he said. “You just…”

“Went on violent rampages, yeah,” Steve finished. “I don’t think she’s the type.”

“Hey, you never know,” Bucky said. “You don’t look the type, either. Too damn rosy.”

Steve kicked Bucky in the shin. Bucky trapped Steve’s leg between his own and ran the arch of his foot over Steve’s ankle. “Oh my God,” Steve said, “you’re impossible."

“Depends on what you’re trying to do,” Bucky retorted. Steve sighed and went back to his food.

“Hey,” Bucky said after a moment. “You’re a good friend, scrap.”

“Somehow,” Steve said, “I don’t think acting toward her the way I do toward you would work out all that well.”

Bucky rolled his eyes. “Good one. No, I mean it. You’re a good friend. And a good guy. The best,” he said, a little dopily, and Steve couldn’t help a small smile. “I don’t think you screwed up so bad as you think, is all,” he finished. “The nervous fit could’ve been a time bomb.”

+++

Bucky was eating a roast beef sandwich over the sink sometime mid-morning when a sound alarmingly reminiscent of a dog’s yap suddenly emanated from the bedroom.

“Steve?” he called.

“Mrs.!” Steve shrieked.

Bucky sighed and put down his sandwich.

Steve was sitting at the foot of the bed, hunched over the iPad. He looked both baffled and horrified.

“Mrs. who?” Bucky said. “Just realized Clark Gable got hitched again after the war?”

Steve glared. “Look.” He waved the screen in Bucky’s face.

**from: sstark@starkindustries.org**

**to: sgr980899@gmail.com**

**subject: I invite you to my rooms tomorrow.**

**Captain Steve Rogers.**

**Thank you for your company Tuesday. I apologize for my sudden illness. I would like to invite you to my rooms tomorrow afternoon. They are at 5th Avenue and East 63rd Street, by the green.**

**Gods go with you.**

**Mrs. Sansa Stark.**

“ _ Mrs., _ ” he repeated.

“Does she even know what Mrs. means?” Bucky asked. “Hell, you didn’t know what Ms. meant.”

“I know  _ now _ ,” Steve huffed. He looked, for all the histrionics, genuinely distressed. “Maybe she doesn’t know,” he said. “But maybe she does.”

Bucky sat down next to him. “How old is she?”

“ _ Nineteen _ .”

“People get married at nineteen all the damn time.”

Steve looked at the screen. “I guess so,” he began, then paused. “It’s just,” he put the tablet to the side, “she… I don’t know.”

“You got a bad feeling.”

“Not a  _ bad  _ feeling,” Steve said. He looked up at Bucky. “She really is a kid, is all.”

Bucky looked at Steve for a second: those glassy eyes he only got when he wasn’t faking any of his worry, his hands folded in his laps, his mouth a thin line. He cared. Bucky remembered the way Steve had gnawed the inside of his cheek when Leon, the next-door neighbors’ quiet, funny, almost definitely queer kid, broke his arm riding his bike. Steve wasn’t great with children, but the guy imprinted.

“Kind of,” Bucky said. “She can impale like nobody’s business, though. Gotta count for something."

+++

The best-case scenario, Steve told himself, was that Sansa Stark had a very short and happy marriage to a man she had recently been forced to leave behind forever. One hell of an awful best-case scenario.

Steve tried not to think about the worst-case scenario.

Bucky snored moistly into Steve’s shoulder. It was, as it always had been, sort of disgusting. Steve ran his fingers through Bucky’s hair gently, careful not to wake him.

Steve had somehow forgotten, and was still not entirely used to, just how breath-catchingly  _ handsome  _ Bucky was. He’d probably never been fully used to it in the first place. Bucky used to hold himself like he really was the movie star he looked like—he danced like it, too. Steve didn’t even look like an extra, back then.

But Bucky had loved him anyway. Bucky would’ve loved him if he’d been shackled to an iron lung for the rest of his life, or if he got so skinny the fronts of his ribs showed through, or if he had kept up his dumb, viciously jealous stream of complaints about Bucky going out with girls forever.

Of all the bewildering chance in Steve’s life, that was what continually shocked him the most: that Bucky stayed. Even after—well, after either roughly twenty or roughly eighty years, depending on how you counted.

When Steve came back, what he felt, first and most intensely, was insulated: from his world, from his life, from his terror, from himself. Everything looked like a photo of itself; nothing but nightmares and blood got through. He thought maybe the part of his brain that could properly feel had died under the ice, shriveled and failed to regenerate.

He used to avoid jerking off for physiologically unwise lengths of time, because when he did, he sometimes thought about Bucky, and when he thought about Bucky, he wanted to kill himself, and he didn’t know if killing himself was something he could even  _ do _ , now. He had tried, with the plane, but that hadn’t worked. His wounds healed without scarring, and he could probably drink a bottle of antifreeze without it giving him anything worse than a headache.

Wanting to kill himself wasn’t a feeling, even: it was a thought. Thinking was all he could really do. That, and fighting.

He wept, for the first time in years, when he saw Bucky. He wept again when Bucky came back to him. When Bucky, against all reason, chose Steve again.

But he had smiled, really smiled, for the first time in years, when he and Sam watched  _ Star Wars  _ together, and Sam laughed every time Steve was genuinely impressed by the special effects. This was before Bucky came back. Steve was still insulated, but it seemed, in that moment with Sam, like there might be a world outside.

Steve didn’t know a thing about Sansa Stark. He hoped she was holding out for a world outside.

+++

Sansa viewed the bleakness and disarray of her room as a catastrophe she lacked the skill to adequately handle. Cleaning was something she had never experienced firsthand; it  _ occurred _ , but in the same way wind and sun occurred, produced by forces she respected but had no desire to emulate. She made an effort to tidy, but whatever she did only compounded matters. Eventually, she gave up. She knew what it looked like—the mugs with petrified dregs of hot cocoa (a far superior alternative to coffee) coating their insides, the small pile of novels, the sparse, hideous furniture. But it would have to do.

Rogers’ message to her had read:

**from: sgr980899@gmail.com**

**to: sstark@starkindustries.org**

**subject: Re: I invite you to my rooms tomorrow.**

**Dear Mrs. Stark,**

**Thank you so much for inviting me! I will be there at 2. I hope you’re having a good day.**

**Thanks again!**

**Sincerely,**

**Steve**

The message reminded her of the way Steve had spoken to her from outside the bathroom, like he had laid down his sword and was telling her he would forgive her for delivering the killing blow. Interacting with a grown man who behaved this way felt utterly bizarre. She had investigated and learned that Ms. was a title reserved for unmarried or divorced women. Sansa was glad he had come to understand that she was neither.

It was 1:58 when Sansa was interrupted from her sewing by a knock at the door. Steve was slouched awkwardly, wearing a jacket made from a poorly-maintained animal skin. “Hi,” he announced. He stuck his hand out again, then looked down at it as though it had moved of its own volition. “Um,” he said, “I guess we don’t need to shake hands again.”

Sansa nodded at him slowly. “Welcome,” she said. “Would you like to come in?”

He nodded vigorously, and she stepped back. She watched as he raked his eyes over the room, then abruptly averted them. “I like your apartment,” he said, everything in it unconvincing.

“Thank you,” Sansa said automatically, watching as he began, again, to stare. This time, though, he was focused on the dress she was finishing, folded on the table.

“Wow,” he said quietly. “Do you—I don’t mean to pry, but, wow, that’s beautiful. Do you make all your—?” He gestured vaguely at her.

“I do,” she said.

“That’s  _ incredible _ .” He peered again at the half-made dress. “If you don’t mind me asking—“

“No,” she said.

“—do you work from a pattern? With the embroidery, I mean.”

Sansa blinked, surprised. “I make a sketch,” she said cautiously. “But I often change my mind once I’ve started the needlework.”

“That’s always how it was for me, too. I mean, I don’t sew,” he said. “I… drew, mostly. And painted. My ma sewed some, but—nothing like this, of course. This is really…” He was staring at a floral pattern along the hem of the dress on the table. “Wow,” he repeated.

She watched him for a moment. His complete absorption in her work made her both more and less uneasy in his presence. The reason she’d been willing to invite Steve over at all, besides his being (quite obviously) categorically uninterested in her, was that he seemed, in all his startling vulnerability, like a decent man. She’d had no expectation that he would be any better a conversationalist today than he was at the tavern. She had expected even less that he would be interested in anything about her, other than circumstances. But feigning such an embarrassing fascination with her clothes couldn’t possibly be a strategic maneuver. Steve wasn’t pretending.

Sansa had planned to offer him something to drink or eat, make conciliatory small talk for several minutes, then see him out. If his staring at the dress Sansa was making was any indication, this plan was now out of the question. Sansa scrambled for an alternative.

It seemed Steve was also becoming aware of his own awkwardness. He glanced at her, rubbing the back of his neck. “Sorry,” he said. “I hope I didn’t make you uncomfortable. It’s just, I haven’t met anyone making—you know, art, for awhile. Good art.” He cleared his throat.

Sansa made a very quick decision. Before Steve could say anything else, she asked him, “Would you like to see?”

“What?”

“Would you like to see others,” she finished, before she could take the offer back.

Something terrifyingly bright, like a cloudless sun glinting off icecaps, overtook Steve’s face. “I would love to,” he told her.

+++

Several hours later, Sansa had explained the construction processes of three gowns, two pairs of shoes, five pouches, and countless smaller garments. Her voice was hoarse with talking. Steve seemed transfixed.

“This one,” she explained, “is reversible.” He nodded rapidly, then winced. Sansa hadn’t noticed anything wrong, but he hadn’t made any real move to hide the pained expression, so it seemed impolite not to ask. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah!” Steve exclaimed. “Yeah, this is great. I’m just, uh,” he gestured nonsensically, “my metabolism’s really fast, so I get headaches when I go a while without eating. But I’m fine.”

Sansa did not know what a metabolism was, but this seemed easy enough to resolve. “I have food and drink, if you would like any.”

He made a face of simultaneous and frighteningly intense gratitude and sheepishness. “I don’t want to impose!”

“I have plenty to eat,” she said. “The eff bee eye pays me quite a lot.” She rose from the sofa and  made her way around Steve, who had, for some reason, sat on the floor. “Have you had hot cocoa?” she asked. “It’s a hot, sweet drink.”

“That sounds great,” Steve said quickly, standing. “Really, I don’t want to be any trouble.”

Ignoring him, Sansa set water to boil and placed bread and cheese on two plates. They looked dismal, but she had no better options. “Here,” she said, setting them on the table. “The hot cocoa will be ready soon.”

“Thank you so, so much,” Steve said. Sansa was realizing that it was physically impossible to respond to all of his thank-yous and apologies. She began to eat, and he followed.

+++

It was dark out when Steve left. The rain was back, but it was more of a mist today, and the walk to the subway was comfortable enough. Steve found himself almost whistling.

“Got lucky?” Bucky asked as Steve shut the front door behind him. Steve stuck his tongue out as he toed off his boots, strewing them conspicuously across the floor. “That’s just mean,” Bucky said, staring at the wet tracks they left on the hardwood.

“Serves you right,” Steve said, collapsing on the sofa beside Bucky. “She’s an artist,” he told him.

Bucky raised his eyebrows. “She draws?”

“She makes her own dresses, Buck,” Steve said. “They’re amazing. I can’t describe them. She has this one with, with this bird on the arms, and the torso’s a tree, and—wow.”

Bucky hummed noncommittally, scooting closer to Steve and carding a hand through the hair at the naps of his neck. “Good job.”

Steve rolled his eyes, but relaxed against Bucky. The TV was playing a show with lots of yelling and close-ups on faces.

“What’s this?” Steve asked.

“Some food thing,” Bucky said, distracted. He was stroking Steve’s hair with one hand and playing some sort of complicated math game on his phone with the other.

Steve had an idea.

+++

**Dear Mrs. Stark:**

**Thank you so much for having me over. I had a great time. I was wondering if you would maybe be interested in going to a grocer (food store) together? If not, I understand, but I thought the new foods were interesting when I woke up here. And many of the old foods were better. Maybe your foods were better than any here, but trying can be fun.**

**Steve**

 

**Captain Steve Rogers.**

**Thank you for your message. I would be pleased to take your offer. Please meet me at my quarters at nearest convenience.**

**Gods go with you.**

**Mrs. Sansa Stark.**

 

Sansa, apparently, found the idea of buying cheese imported from anywhere in particular ridiculous. “What would be different about it?” she asked Steve as he pocketed his phone,  wracking his brain for an alternate shopping expedition just as neutral as gourmet food. There was fabric, but he had no idea where to go for that, and had the baseless but alarming idea that it would be particularly easy for assassins out for Sansa’s blood to hide behind rolls of taffeta. What else? Jewelry? That eluded him, too.

“I have no idea,” Steve answered her honestly. “I guess some people can tell. You know, like with wine.” He didn’t understand the differences between wines, either, but he decided not to voice that.

Sansa clearly, if a bit tentatively, perked up at that. “I’m fond of wine.”

Steve found himself nodding so enthusiastically that he quickly forgot the logistics of alcohol purchase. “You can’t buy wine yourself,” he said, a quick disclosure. “You’ve got to be 21 for that.”

Sansa made an expression like he’d just announced to her that modern Earth-dwellers had six legs and three heads each. “Twenty-one.”

“I know, kind of silly,” Steve said, feeling, absurdly, like his role was to apologize on behalf of twenty-first-century America. He changed tack. “I can buy for you, though, obviously.”

When Steve used to buy beers for Bucky’s sisters, they would all pile on and promise he was the best brother-in-law ever, much better than Becca’s boyfriend, Charlie, whose hairline seemed always to be twitching.

Sansa just looked perplexed. “But I have a great deal of money.”

“Yeah,” Steve said, “but—you know your passport? They ask to see it, usually.”

She narrowed her eyes briefly. “They might ask.” After a moment, she sighed. “I can prove this to you,” she said. “Let’s go to the wine pantry.”

Steve’s phone buzzed.

“I just got off the Q,” Bucky said. “Fuck the Q. You still want to go to the Met later?”

“Actually,” Steve said, and he looked at Sansa. “One second.” He held the phone to his shirt for privacy. “Would it be alright if my friend Bucky came?”

Sansa shrugged.

“You sure?”

“If that will make it easier for you to to believe me,” she said, “when you are proven wrong.”

Steve laughed. He held the phone to his ear again. “You want to meet Sansa?” he asked.

“You know, these microphones are too good for the shirt thing to work,” Bucky said. Steve made a face. “But sure,” Bucky finished. “Probably going to scare the shit out of her, though.”

Steve looked at Sansa. She was sitting on the awful beige sofa, back very straight, embroidering what looked like a shoe. “I doubt it,” Steve said.

+++

Bucky was leaning against a Starbucks window and smoking when they arrived. He jerked his chin up at them. Steve fought the urge to roll his eyes at the theatrics.

“Hey,” Bucky said.

“Bucky, this is Sansa,” Steve said. “Sansa, Bucky.”

Bucky moved his cigarette to his left hand, sticking the right out to shake. “How you doing,” he said. Sansa put her hand out, palm down. When she’d done this to Steve, he’d been puzzled. Bucky seemed to find it hilarious. “Well, okay,” he said, and shook her hand by the wrist.

A few minutes before, Steve had texted Bucky, “Please don’t flirt with her or anything this should be obvious she is traditional.” Bucky had responded, “cant take flirting thats medieval”. Steve hadn’t responded.

“It is a pleasure to meet you,” Sansa told Bucky, mouth shrinking like she didn’t quite believe what she was saying. Steve shot daggers at Bucky, and Bucky pulled a face of what he probably thought looked like perfect innocence. In fact, Bucky looked the way he did when he forgot his lines in the all-school Christmas pageant, which was, mainly, startled.

“Okay,” Steve said, clapping his hands together. He realized that Bucky and Sansa made the same exact expression at him when he did this. “Sansa, if this goes bad—“

“Wine doesn’t go bad.”

“Is this a fucking robbery?”

Sansa cut her eyes at Bucky. “No,” she said. “I am buying myself wine, which Steve believes there are laws against.”

“There  _ are _ laws against it!” Steve said. “I didn’t say I thought they made sense—“

“Thank you for your concern,” Sansa cut him off, and turned to enter the store. Steve and Bucky followed.

+++

“Not  _ that _ one,” Steve said, aghast. 

Sansa cut her eyes to him. “Why not?”

“Why—“ He gaped. “It’s a 150-dollar beverage!”

“You’ve tried it, I’m sure,” she said. “Tony Stark serves it at his Tower. I tasted it last week. It’s excellent.”

“Yeah, but I wasn’t shelling out a quarter grand for it!”

Sansa pulled the bottle off the shelf. “150 isn’t a quarter of a thousand,” she said offhand, leading Steve helplessly down the aisle.

Steve turned to Bucky, widening his eyes. Bucky shrugged. “She’s got expensive tastes.” Sansa, thank God, didn’t seem to hear Bucky, though it was just as likely that she was ignoring him deliberately.

The cashier was a thin man in a striped shirt. “I’d like to purchase this wine,” Sansa told him.

“That you can do,” he said, seemingly unfazed by the fact that this wine cost _ as much as a telephone _ . “Can I see an ID?

Sansa slid him a hundred dollar bill. He looked at it, looked around at the other customers, looked at Sansa, looked back at the bill, and then, finally, nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Cash or credit?”

“Credit, please.” Sansa unsheathed her AmEx card from the tiny pouch she had made for it.

+++

“That,” Sansa said as they walked out, Steve holding Sansa’s bag, “was a quarter of a thousand dollars.”

“Oh my god,” Steve said.

“What the fuck,” Bucky said.

“Anyone who says that they won’t do something,” Sansa told them, “means they won’t do it without a bribe.” She seemed close to smiling. Close to smug. Steve noticed himself grinning along with her.

Bucky turned to Steve. “Can I bribe you to stop rereading  _ The City of God _ ?”

“Funny,” Steve replied.

+++

Sansa was told to watch “secret meetings” in the places of worship she had been assigned. Most secret meetings, it seemed, were facilitated by stout, loud-voiced mothers. She learned about religiously correct skin creams, bafflingly small carrots, and going to “the Why.”

Sansa investigated the Why only to find that it was a building in which people exercised. She was getting bored. Why did the eff bee eye need to know whether P.S. 26 served halal lunches?

But she kept watching. It wasn’t as though she had been given many options.

+++

Sansa came to their house for the first time few nights later. Steve didn’t notice the number of ashtrays in the apartment until Sansa had already sat down. “I’m so sorry,” he said, lunging for the green ceramic plate on the coffee table. He’d made it in the kiln at Pratt while a pink-haired girl looked over his shoulder and dictated unsolicited instructions. He was happy with how it had turned out.

Sansa gave him an odd look. “Why are you sorry?”

“Smoking. I mean, smoking cigarettes indoors is,” he started, then realized he didn’t know how to continue. Why  _ didn’t  _ people smoke indoors anymore? Was it unsanitary? Less healthy than smoking outside? Did it do something to all the electronics everyone had? It hadn’t done anything to his and Bucky’s electronics.

Bucky chose that moment to saunter in. “Are you really trying to explain to her why she should be scandalized by what we do in our own home?”

“I am not bothered by cigarettes,” Sansa cut in. She was staring meaningfully at Bucky, who was wearing nothing but a pair of hideously expensive silk boxers and Steve’s ratty Copwatch t-shirt. Steve cleared his throat, and Bucky rolled his eyes, though he did retreat to the bedroom to put on some (also hideously expensive) silk pajama pants. “My  _ own home _ ,” he muttered.

Despite the rocky beginning, Sansa seemed to have a nice enough evening with them. Steve certainly did. They ordered Greek food and ate it around the kitchen table, Sansa seemingly unfazed by the quantities both Steve and Bucky consumed. Then they watched the tail end of some kind of romantic comedy marathon on the TV while Sansa let Steve ask her questions about the very elaborate shoe embroidery she was working on.

Sansa had left said shoes at the apartment, so Steve took it upon himself to return them, taking the train to the Upper East Side the next day. He considered calling ahead, but it didn’t seem necessary—she wasn’t any more used to that kind of pleasantry than he and Bucky were.

When no one answered her buzzer, he didn’t think much of it, slipping in as a man in what appeared to be a velvet suit was exiting. (He resolved to tell Bucky about the suit later.) But when knocking on her apartment door yielded no response, he started to worry.

It wouldn’t be odd, except that Sansa seemed to only leave the building when she was with Steve. Even Nat only really paid home visits, apparently, and whatever Sansa’s work involved didn’t require her to step foot outdoors.  _ Maybe she’s asleep,  _ he thought, then gave a particularly hard knock to the door. No response. He didn’t know much about Sansa Stark, but he found it difficult to believe that she would be able to sleep through that.

Just before Steve broke down and called Nat, Sansa opened the door, looking exactly as she always did: not exactly okay, but not seriously injured, either.

“Steve.” Sansa sounded surprised, but not displeased. Steve held up the pair of slippers, and she smiled slightly. “Oh. Thank you.”

“Of course,” he said, and then, because he couldn’t help himself, “is everything alright?”

“It is. I apologize,” Sansa said. “I was just on assignment.”

Maybe it was the adrenaline; maybe it was the obviousness of the distaste in Sansa’s voice today. Whatever the cause, Steve decided to ask, “What kind of assignment?”

Sansa shrugged primly. “I was in a meeting. Mothers reading the Quran. I can’t imagine what the investigations bureau wants that information for. Nothing I would choose, of course.”

“Wait,” Steve said, his brain catching up. “You—didn’t choose?”

“No,” she said slowly. “My salary works to pay off my debt. I have,” she added, a bit nasally, “a unique skill set.”

Steve couldn’t bring himself to laugh, or even quite find the voice funny. “So they’re forcing you.”

Sansa was unperturbed. “They have indentured me.”

“They—” Steve knew he was dangerously close to putting his fist through a wall. He took several deep breaths. “The FBI is forcing you, because you’re  _ indebted  _ to the federal government, to spy on random Quran study groups. With no probable cause.”

She nodded without looking up from her embroidery.

“I gotta go, Sansa,” Steve said.

She blinked and shrugged again.

On his way into the subway, Steve made a call.

+++

Nat deserved a fucking break. She had set the evening aside for what Bucky called “girls’ night.” She consumed exactly ten milligrams of Adderall, put in her earbuds, and started on the treadmill. She was just starting to relax when Steve called her recreational phone.

“Fucking Barnes,” she answered. “You are not supposed to know this number.”

“Nat, you gotta come over. It’s about Sansa.”

“How serious is it?”

“Serious.” 

“Alright, I’m coming.” 

She entered the Rogers-Barnes residence and was immediately hit by the smell of stale cigarettes. “Is this supposed to be a time machine,” she asked, “or an experiment in chemical warfare?” Bucky snorted half-heartedly. Steve began, immediately, to talk.

“I heard the FBI is forcing Sansa to work for them. With  _ debt slavery. _ Spying on mosques.” 

“You heard right.”

“Why in all hell aren’t you upset? What’s wrong with you?” His chin twitched. Bucky rested a hand on his shoulder.

“Thanks, Barnes,” she said. “And Steve, you can stop with your moral outrage. Spies are hard to coerce. I’m sure they’ll figure out that indentured servitude isn’t the way to go with someone who can literally be anywhere at any time.” She swung herself atop their counter. “And don’t worry,” she said, swinging her feet. “I’ve told her the names of some key people.” 

“And?”

“And she has a bunch of mini recording devices for mice and shit. This is going to be  _ fun _ .”

++++++++++++

Sansa became a constant presence at the apartment, soon, despite her general distaste for Bucky. Anything must be better, for her, than being alone. She was already more alone than anybody born in the future could be.

Bucky watched Steve hold himself back, every day, from placing threatening calls to the highest-ranking person Bucky could track down a number for. Nat would’ve had Bucky’s head on a platter, but he would’ve done it for Steve anyway—it wasn’t even a question. But Steve didn’t ask, so Bucky didn’t offer.

Sansa was a spy. She was, Nat said, a phenomenal one. The single most essential skill of a really great spy was also the one most often forgotten: survival.

+++

Steve reminded Sansa of Robb. When she couldn’t stand him, it was for the same reasons: an honesty that verged on stupidity, a hope that verged on cruelty. But he, like Robb, was a good man.

“My father would have liked you,” she told him one day. He had just gotten off the phone with Barnes, who was involved in a weapons exchange in Hoboken. Steve played aghast, but not too aghst to ask Bucky to pick up an extra taser. “Only for emergencies,” Steve had added, clearly meaning it.

Steve opened his mouth, then closed it. He looked the way he did when Barnes walked in the room unexpectedly, sometimes: overcome. “That means a lot, Sansa,” he finally settled on.

He asked Sansa to move in with him and Barnes the following week.

“I would be happy to,” Sansa replied without hesitation. She didn’t have it in her to fear a man so much like her brother.

Steve beamed. After a moment, though, the light in his eyes dimmed. “You should know…” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Well. Bucky and I, we’re together. I mean… together. Like a man and a woman.”

“I know that you’re bent,” Sansa said, surprised.

Steve gaped at her. “What?”

She wrinkled her brow. “Did you think I didn’t know?”

“Well, yeah!” Steve exclaimed. “You—how?”

“How did I know?”

“Yes!”

Sansa fought the urge to laugh; it seemed unkind. “I find it rude when people say those kinds of things about people being bent,” she told Steve. “I don’t like it when people say them about me.”

Steve, somehow, looked even more amazed. “Say what about you?”

Now Sansa couldn’t help it—she laughed softly. “I am a dowager,” she said.

“Isn’t that a—something with royalty?”

“In my world, it is the polite term.” When Steve didn’t respond, she clarified: “For bent.”

Slowly, Steve’s face shifted from shock to joy. “Oh,” he said. “Wow. Thank you for trusting me, Sansa.”

“You’re welcome,” she said, and found herself giggling more than she had in years.

+++

“Sansa’s a lesbian!”

Bucky turned away from the television. He had been watching a calmingly stultifying show about factory protocols. “What?”

“A lesbian!”

“Oh. Huh,” Bucky said. “Good for her.” It wasn’t that much of a surprise, given the clothes and the hair and the pinched expressions. He’d thought she had a crush on Steve for the first thirty seconds she was in the apartment, but realized that wasn’t the case when she said, immediately after taking a sip of the tea Steve gave her, “This milk has gone off.” (The milk was one day expired.)

Steve paced between the television and the couch. “Wow,” he said. “I can’t believe it.”

“That makes sense,” Bucky said, “given you’ve never had a minute-long conversation with a lesbian before.”

Steve stopped and put his hands on his hips, indignant. “Yes I have.”

“When?”

“I worked at a queer bar, Buck.”

“Yeah,” Buck said, “and all your friends were guys who drew for a living. I was friends with the dames.”

Steve glared. “You shouldn’t call them dames.”

“Okay, the dykes.” This did not appease Steve. “Come on,” Bucky said, then tried, “congratulations?”

Steve rolled his eyes, but sat down next to him.

+++

Steve realized, distantly, that the bigger conclusion of that conversation had been that Sansa was moving in with them. He hoped that he’d conveyed this as he drifted off against Bucky’s shoulder.

+++

He had not, in fact, conveyed this. Bucky only realized what had happened when a moving van, a bit overzealous for Sansa’s few possessions, showed up on their block the next day.

“I thought I mentioned it!” Steve was running after Bucky, who had leapt up, exclaimed wordlessly, and slammed the door on his way out when he realized what was going on. They seemed to be heading for the park.

“Oh, yeah,” Bucky said. “You also mentioned to me you wanted to redistribute everything in the MoMA to community centers. You didn’t  _ do that _ , asshole.” He flopped onto a bench, crossing his arms and looking resolutely forward. Steve sat next to him.

When Bucky screwed up small, he usually said something approximating  _ here’s why it isn’t fair to the Sisters to steal their pencils when I leave mine at home _ (modified to fit whatever his infraction was), called Steve sweetheart, and offered to sleep on the couch. Steve would lick his wounds for several hours, then start kissing on Bucky, and things would be more or less resolved, because this apology process had been perfected to work on Steve. (Steve knew, because he’d been there for the whole editing process. He was the entire focus group.)

Steve’s apologies were much more haphazard, because  _ nothing _ worked consistently on Bucky. He forgave on his own damn time.

Also, Steve had screwed up big. He had to fix it before he could even think about forgiveness.

“She doesn’t have to stay with us,” Steve said softly. “Buck, she’s still got her lease. I’ll take her stuff back right now.”

“Don’t,” Bucky said, but didn’t elaborate, even after Steve had stared at him for an interminable length of time.

“I’ll talk to her,” Steve said, moving to get up. Bucky grabbed his arm.

“Rogers,” he said, “I swear to god.”

“I shouldn’t have done it—“

“Good fucking point, pal—“

“—and I’m going to make it right—“

“—by kicking an orphan teenager out of our house, yeah, that’s great—“

“—it’s not  _ kicking her out _ if she isn’t even moved in. And anyway, you didn’t  _ want _ her to move in—“

“I don’t give a shit!” Bucky exclaimed, standing up. “You think I like the idea of some miserable kid living alone? I’m not a sadist, Jesus Christ.” Steve started to speak, but Bucky kept going. “But you spend three years telling me  _ every for god’s sake day  _ it’s  _ our _ apartment and  _ we’re  _ together but not when you want to do something  _ heroic _ , right? Then  _ we _ gets old pretty quick, doesn’t it.“

“ _ Bucky _ ,” Steve said, and Bucky sat heavily, looking exhausted. Steve took off the kid gloves and wrapped himself around Bucky. They stayed like that for a moment, Bucky not quite hugging back but putting his face in Steve’s neck as he breathed. Finally, Steve said, “you gotta believe me that the amount of stupid I am and the amount I love you are sometimes at odds with each other but just because I’m an idiot doesn’t mean I love you any less, alright? Or want to be with you any less.”

“I got that,” Bucky said. “About 80 years ago, actually.”

Steve scratched his back lightly. “Also,” he said, “you gotta believe me that I’ll do whatever you want on this.”

He could feel the flutter of Bucky’s lids as he rolled his eyes. “Fine.”

“You swear?”

“You’re nuts,” Bucky said, and extricated himself from Steve’s arms. He looked a little red, but okay. “I’m not having sex with you tonight,” he told Steve.

“I’ll live.”

“Fuck off,” Bucky said, and passed Steve a cigarette. He lit Steve’s and let Steve do the same for him.

+++

Sansa’s moving-in gift was a tapestry depicting Saint Sebastian. Somehow, she managed to make his blood look holy, not gorey.

It had been so long since Steve had felt a lump form in his throat at anything that wasn’t life or death, he only barely recognized the feeling. He didn’t hug her, but he nodded once, solemn, and, from the gentle twitch of her eyelids, he thought she got the message.

There was no way Sansa had known Sebastian had been Bucky’s confirmation saint, but Steve took it as a sign anyway.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "This is what a killer looks like,” she whispered to herself. Sansa had begun talking to herself when she started losing people. It wasn’t a habit that worried her. Merely a comfort, like Barnes’s cigarettes.

Sansa liked Steve. Not as much as he liked her—although he seemed to enjoy protecting her more than the pleasure of her company. Her thoughts moved, unbidden, to Sandor Clegane. 

“This is what a killer looks like,” she whispered to herself. Sansa had begun talking to herself when she started losing people. It wasn’t a habit that worried her. Merely a comfort, like Barnes’s cigarettes.

But she did like Steve: his exasperated hands-upturned  _ oh my god _ s, his quiet prayers, the bizarre clash between his artistic sensibility (superb) and dressing sensibility (abysmal).

That wasn’t his most bizarre trait. Steve worried that Sansa would be offended by him and Barnes smoking indoors, but completely ignored the fact that Barnes sauntered around the apartment stripped to the waist. “Bucky.” She hated that non-name, and she hated him. She stared at his nakedness and hated it, hated it, hated it.

His back was so scarred from beating that it appeared to be unraveling. Pink-white threads of skin wove poorly together, like he were a doll made by a young child. 

His looked like Sansa’s back, but further healed and thinning near the buttocks. The scar of his nipple looked different from hers—whiter and oblong, with one dark hair emerging rather ridiculously from the knot.

“I’m sorry,” Barnes said nastily from the sofa, where he was sprawled, bare chest and trousers of an indeterminate greasy-looking fabric, with a novel. “Does this worry you?” He gestured largely at his torso.

“No,” she said. “I doubt you’ll have twins.” Those were Ramsey’s words. His tongue had found a way back into her mouth. Sansa went into the privy and wondered if she would cry. She did not.

+++

Steve and Barnes were squeezed into a small couch, broad as they were, watching a show with pretty girls, rifles, and monologues. Romanoff and Sansa sat in adjacent chairs. Romanoff was playing a colorful game on her phone and smoking a joint.    
  
“Can I try?” Sansa asked, gesturing at the phone.   
  
“Yeah, sure.” Romanoff was sweating with the August heat, drops slipping between her rigorously confined breasts. “Just try and pop the bubbles that are the same color.”   
  
Sansa tried, failed, and handed the phone back. “I’m no good with other people’s phones. What if I accidentally see a nude picture?”   
  
“You immediately dissolve into a pile of ash.”   
  
“Funny.”   
  
“It would be if you finished your beer.”   
  
“Fine,” Sansa said, and gulped at the bottle until she was finished. She sat, a bit dizzy, and said, “still not funny.” Romanoff’s face opened and laughter poured out.   
  
“You wanna try some?” she said, gesturing with the joint. “It’s not chemical compounds like they give you. Just leaves.”   
  
“I know what weed is, Romanoff.”

At that, Steve’s head whipped around, seemingly of its own volition, and he glanced sharply at Sansa. Barnes snorted.

Romanoff held up her hands. “Okay, okay, Christ. D’you want to go somewhere Steve isn’t mother-henning?”   
  
Steve spoke up. “I am not mother-henning—” and was cut of by Barnes palm over his mouth.    
  
“Can I please hear the goddamn picture,” he said, waving Sansa and Romanoff away with his other  hand.

Romanoff took Sansa by the wrist and pulled her into the wild garden in front of an abandoned house. Romanoff perched low on her heels, rendered herself neigh-invisible in the long grass. Sansa could see her rummaging. She ran her tongue over a paper. Her lips shone with gloss and dye. Sansa looked away and plucked a small wild-ripened tomato. 

“What’re you doing?” Romanoff said. “We’ve got the good plant right here.”

“I’m just getting some tomatoes for when you get ‘munchies.’”

“Are you deliberately trying to prevent me from snacking? Or do you just have the power to make anything unappealing?”

“Second one, mostly.”

“Useful power,”

“Oh, I know.”

Romanoff laughed. “Done!” She exclaimed. “C’mere and try this.” 

Sansa sat in the long grass and inhaled from the smoking paper and began to cough like a woman dying. 

Romanoff took the joint. “Small breaths,” she said. “Like this.”

Sansa tried again, managed to inhale some, and then passed it back. Soon they were laying down in the high grass, staring at fascinatingly solid-looking clouds. Sansa couldn’t move, but it didn’t bother her much.

Natasha—Romanoff—poked her. It felt as though she had two sets of fingernails on the one finger. “That one looks like a fetus.”

Sansa laughed. “No it doesn’t.”

“Yes it  _ does. _ ”

“No.” The two of them were laughing uncontrollably.

“Yes.”

“I saw one,” Sansa said. “A fetus. And it didn’t look like that.”

“Where in all fuck did you get a fetus from?”

“Me. My fetus. So I know.”

“Did you do it yourself? Because then it just looks like mush.”

“No, I couldn’t do it. Hornfoot medicine-woman did it. Really hurt.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“Wait, did you do it all by yourself?”

“One time, yeah.” Natasha puffed up like a rooster. “With just some wire.” 

Sansa looked at the sky. “Wire.”

“Yeah”

“That show you like.”

“We’re way too high. Let’s stop talking.”

Sansa fell half-asleep and slipped into a crow. For a time, she watched herself from above. And then she ate some tomatoes.

+++

Sansa had not taken into account what it would feel like to live with two people who had been able, it seemed, to overcome what she hadn’t.

What it felt like was not bad, really. But it was often baffling.

They embraced often, Bucky shirtless, and Steve ran his hands up and down his back. As if it were a normal back. As if it were Bucky’s own true flesh, not tissue created by sadists. 

Sansa knew that they made love regularly as well. Hydra was smarter than Ramsey. They had presumably left his genitals intact—good leverage for a man. 

One night, they kept her up long with their creaking and panting. Bucky left, later, to piss, and Sansa was so full of jealous rage that she unscrewed the bathroom doorknob. 

“Alright, Sansa,” he said, rapping at the door. “Let me out.”

“How much was that  _ thing  _ of yours worth?” she asked him. “Five lives? Twenty? Fifty?” 

He said nothing. She began to weep for Theon. How she missed him! How she wished that she could trade what was between her legs for a gentle nothing-at-all. She put the doorknob back, but Bucky did not come out. She heard the lock click like a broken jaw. 

“I’m sorry.” She said. Barnes retched. She inhaled, exhaled, and said, “I haven’t got the left one either.”

Bucky fell silent for a moment. “Family resemblance, I guess.” 

“Must be.”

He let out a humorless chuckle and she began to giggle like a woman possessed. 

+++

Bucky did not tell Steve about whatever might have happened to Sansa Stark’s nipple. He tried to believe that she was born without one. And then he made use of his ability to put memories away, and did not wait for explanation. 

+++

Sansa wouldn’t set foot on the subway, and learning to drive was right out. She couldn’t keep stealing horses forever, either.

Natasha and Barnes came up with the bike plan at the very worst bar they frequented, a Staten Island hole in the wall where the bartender was surly enough to refuse even Natasha free drinks. This wasn’t true anywhere else and was most of the reason Natasha and Barnes liked the place so much.

In a rare adventurous moment, Natasha had ordered straight gin instead of straight vodka. She was regretting it and kept stealing sips from Barnes’s beer.

“Fuck off,” he said, swatting at her from across the crumb-embedded circle booth. “I don’t know where your mouth’s been.”

She gave him an unimpressed look. “Which one of us puts Ensure in their coffee? Ensure’s worse than anonymous jizz. So is Steve’s jizz, come to think of it. His sperm count’s probably, like, 700 million.”

“Oh,” Barnes said rapturously, “ _ more _ ,” and Natasha kicked  him in the shin. He didn’t even have the decency to flinch.

“She’s  _ always there _ ,” Bucky said. “I get up; she’s there. I get back from a run; she’s there. I drink supercaloric coffee; she’s there. I watch TLC; she’s there.”

“I told you TLC was good,” Natasha said.

Barnes ignored her. “What the hell am I supposed to do?”

“It’s not like she’s got anywhere else to go.”

“I know  _ that _ ,” Barnes said. “I just miss being able to fuck in the middle of the day, alright?”

Natasha rolled her eyes. “Sure.”

“I’m serious.”

“Clearly, you have no sympathy or affection whatever for this kid.”

“None.” He took a very bitchy slurp of her gin, then winced. “I hate gin.”

“I know. You’re too soft.”

“Because I want the teenage girl in my house to be happy, or because I don’t like drinking your straight alcohol?”

“Both.”

“I only ever liked straight alcohol because I was being brainwashed by Russians.”

“So was I, and I haven’t lost it.”

“Well,” Barnes said, “looks like you’re the bigger man here.” He exhaled loudly. “Should she be on Prozac or something?”

“She won’t even take Ibuprofen voluntarily.”

They sat in silence for a moment, Barnes showily hoarding his beer. Then he said, quieter, “It’s gotta be hell for her, being cooped up with us.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, Jung.”

“Not even Freud?”

“No,” Barnes said. “You’re too derivative.”

“That’s mean.”

“She should at least be able to go to the NPYL,” Barnes said. “Or the Met. She’d like the Met. All the costumes.”

“ _ You _ go to the Met. Take her with you.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not afraid of being swallowed up by the ghosts of New York past if I go underground. She is.” He paused and chuckled. “I’m as close a thing as we’ve got to the ghost of New York past, aren’t I? So’s Steve.”

“What about a bike?”

“Haha.  _ No _ . You think she’d go for that? Every time Steve starts his, she puts up another notice on the fridge about discretion and ambient noise.”

“You really do have an extra dick where your brain should be,” Natasha said. “I mean an actual bike, not the porncycle.” The vehicle in question was the kind of motorcycle only a man making a point about his freedom to ride any motorcycle he pleased would purchase.

“We use the porncycle  _ as _ an actual bike. It’s not its fault it’s a porncycle.” But Barnes was clearly considering Natasha’s idea. “You know anyone with a regular bike?”

“Well, probably Sam.” She pulled her making-fun-of-Sam microexpression, which didn’t involve any particular facial movements do much as the general impression of being a person who goes on kayaking dates. Barnes laughed uproariously. “We can just use a Citi bike,” Natasha said.

“It’s not a bad idea.”

“I’m not a bad handler.”

Barnes rolled his eyes. “If you’re handling Sansa, you’re doing a shit job. You gave her to  _ Steve _ .”

“Can you imagine Steve as a handler?”

“Believe me, I have.”

Natasha sighed. “Is this one of your weird sex things?”

“Kind of. Mostly a weird post-traumatic amnesia thing.”

“Not that weird.” Natasha took advantage of Barnes’s distraction to down the rest of his beer. “The sex stuff is weirder.”

+++

Steve held the bicycle as Sansa climbed atop it. Her face was an immovable grim mask. Sometimes, Bucky thought, Steve was a bit stupid in not fearing her.

“Okay,” he said. “Now, the faster you pedal, the steadier you are. Which seems unintuitive—”

“Let’s get on with it,” she interjected. Bucky had never heard her interrupt anybody whom she actually liked. “Shall we?”

And she climbed atop the bicycle, adjusted her silk trousers, and gripped the handlebars. Steve remained in position. 

“Steve?” Bucky said. “Steve, go.” Steve nodded, grinning goofily, and began to run. Sansa pedaled. 

Unfortunately, Steve could run as fast as anyone riding a bike. They made an entire lap around the concrete path and returned, Steve still running with the handlebars. Nat was laughing into her arm. The two of them did look rather silly, Sansa pumping determinedly and Steve sprinting, slanted sideways, next to her.

“I think it’s time to let her go,” Bucky said to Steve. But he was already yards away.

“WHAT?” Steve shouted.

“LET. GO.”

And so he did. And for three magical, slow-motion minutes, Sansa was riding a bicycle. “This is some Wes Anderson shit,” said Nat, a genuine happiness spread across her cheeks. The moment ended with a distant yelp as Sansa tumbled over the handlebars at high speed and collided with the pavement. 

They set to running. Sansa stood, bloody-nosed, and inspected her flayed knees and palms. Then she picked the gravel from her skin, grabbed the bike, and climbed wordlessly back on. All three of them, including Nat, whooped and cheered with abandon. Steve grabbed Bucky and kissed him. “Lookit that,” said Bucky. “She’s like you.”

It was true. Steve learned to ride a bike when he was so small that only his toes touched the pedals. He was a slow learner, but he did learn, and after a few days of injuries he could ride a bicycle faster and better than even Bucky. 

Sansa fell again, sideways this time. She pulled herself, brine-eyed, from the pavement. And she climbed back on. And back on. And back once again. Later, as she rode steadily home through the damp evening, Bucky reminded himself not to underestimate her. Underestimating Steves was dangerous. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> do heed the warnings on this chapter (more info in endnotes)
> 
> thanks everybody who has read, we love you

“I’m not coming to New York just to let you rear-end my Subaru trying to move into the new house. Sorry, Steve.”

“That’s okay,” Steve told Sam, and it was. Technically, he and Bucky had a car, but they kept it in the Stark Industries underground lot and almost never used it. He’d mostly wanted to see Sam, who hadn’t been up to New York in months, now. Sam was more dedicated to maintaining a normal life than anyone in the Barnes-Stark-Rogers household.

“So neither of you ever learned to drive properly. I mean, except under, what, duress?”

“Not really,” Steve said. “Bucky’s pretty good now. And I drove in the field, sometimes. But…” He cleared his throat. “You’ve experienced that.”

Sam shuddered. “Yeah, definitely have. Do you just not  _ see _ red lights?”

“If there’s nobody crossing the road, then why—” Steve started, then abandoned his argument. He wasn’t likely to win, and for good reason. “Well,” he said instead, “I’m sure Tony’ll be happy to berate us for moving into a house without a solid gold sink. Again.”

They were moving just down the block, to a duplex where Sansa could have her own (her words) quarters. Steve had never lived in a house before, but the extra space didn’t feel wrong, the way extra space always used to. There was room in the formica kitchen for Steve to make bad coffee while Bucky made good stew. For Sansa to have to walk over to glare at them when Bucky refused to stop playing the radio so loudly it drowned out the TV. Actually, the house was probably big enough that Bucky could play the radio and Sansa could watch the TV simultaneously without any conflict.

“A solid gold sink. Don’t get me wrong, Steve, I like your neighborhood, but Nat told me she saw roaches last time she was in your kitchen,” Sam said. “And you’re a millionaire.”

“I don’t feel like a millionaire,” Steve said, and Sam scoffed, which Steve deserved. “Fine. We’re being bohemian. Are you happy? Is that what you want me to admit?”

“ _ Bohemian _ ?”

“Isn’t that what you call it?”

Sam was wheezing with almost worrying force. “Jesus Christ. Bohemian. I’m sorry, dude, but—you can’t have always been  _ this _ gay. Right?”

“Gayer still,” Steve said. It was probably true. He didn’t really know how to rank these things by modern standards, but in 1940, at least, he’d been about as queer as you could get, even among queers. Bucky would probably argue that his introduction to this century had only made him worse, but Steve thought that was debatable. After all, he could do the Monkey Voice now, and only people who really wanted to see through it—or who had Monkey Voices themselves—could. (Sam, for example, sometimes put on a voice that wasn’t quite his own, though it was a subtle one. His center of gravity shifted whenever he saw somebody he had served with, and his vocal cords seemed to adjust.)

When Sam could speak again, he said, “you’re gonna kill me,” and then, “oh, shit, I got a client in ten.  Talk later?”

“Sure,” Steve said. “Take care.” Gingerly, he hung up. Once, he had meant to hit “end call” but instead hit “add contact to call,” and suddenly Greg-from-church was saying, voice completely bewildered, “Steve?” and Tony Stark was laughing hysterically. Steve had told Greg-from-church that he was on a business call, which was true. (Greg-from-church and David-from-church both knew, Steve was certain, but he wasn’t going to spell out, “I’m Captain America,” if he could help it. Especially after spelling out, “I envy you two, because my own boyfriend’s relationship to my Catholicism is strained,” which came out embarrassingly soon after he met them.)

Later that day, the three of them sat down to a puttanesca hastily prepared by Bucky. His shirt was on, which seemed to quiet Sansa’s discomfort. Steve didn’t blame her. Bucky’s bare torso was frightening—a breathing, pulsing reminder that people are capable of horrors. Steve loved Bucky, and so he tried not to be too frightened.

“So,” he said, sawing through the silence. “We’re gonna be without running water for a couple days. Is everyone okay with that?”

Bucky laughed. “Ain't nobody at this table grew up with running water.”

Steve turned to Sansa. “Are you okay with this?”

“No,” she said, smirking. “I shudder to think.”

Bucky actually laughed, a loud bark of surprise. “What’ll she do without running water, Steve?” 

“Oh,” she said, “I’ve just never learned to cope without water spraying from metal tubes.”

“I get it, I get it, Middle Ages, I get it.” Steve realized that he couldn’t stop smiling. They were still going back and forth, poking fun, and he was so full of love that it hurt.

+++

It was true that spies were hard to manipulate: Sansa had put her foot down, eventually, about the study groups. “This is ridiculous,” she sniffed. “There is nothing remotely dangerous about those women’s small carrots. Why am I spying on them?”

_ Because the CIA is evil _ , Natasha decided not to say. “No good reason,” she told Sansa instead, which was just as true. Then they got Sansa into federal government.

Natasha was looking through Sansa’s mouse-spying videos. “Lookit this.” She poked Tony. “He’s  _ literally  _ shitting on women.”

“Like the Truman show with scat porn and Russian collision.” 

“As in, what? We’re making a compiled Truman show with the ratcams?”

“No, like we’re the people  _ in _ the Truman Show watching it.”

“I’ll buy that.” Nat held her hand up near his face when she heard an agent speaking in Russian. Tony shut up for a period of five seconds. 

“You’d think,” he said, “that someone with so much power’d be the one tryna get shat on.”

Nat giggled. “Stop projecting,” she said.

“You project onto portal-girl.”

“No I do  _ not. _ ”

“Then how come you haven’t told her about her own videography?”

Nat exhaled. “Shit.”

“She’s in the shower. It’ll make good noise cover.”

“Okay.” 

When Nat pulled open the curtain, Sansa exclaimed and blindly tried to cover her naked body. 

This is what Nat saw: buttocks rough and purple with scars. Swaths of skin burnt away from her inner thighs. Left nipple cut out completely. Fuck. “Fuck.” 

“Get out.” Sansa’s voice cracked. Foam slid down her face. Her eyes were open, blinking and tearing behind a sheet of shampoo. 

“Okay,” said Nat. She backed away through the curtain, almost slipping in conditioner. “I’m so sorry,” she said. 

“Out!”

Nat felt rearranged inside—her heart rattling in her lungs, her stomach digesting her throat. She shrugged on a robe, went into the courtyard, and waited for Sansa, too horrified to really feel the cold.

It was nearly an hour before Sansa emerged. She was fully dressed with still-soapy hair. “Hello,” she said.

“Hi.”

Sansa paused, inhaled damply through her nose, and said, “Please do not put words on what you saw.” 

“Of course.”

“Nobody will know. Do you understand?”

Nat nodded. Sansa sat up and left, straight-backed and slightly dazed, into the grey morning. God, but she looked so young.

She didn’t plan on calling Steve. But minutes passed, and she thought about him holding onto Sansa’s bicycle, looking like nothing so much as a father. She thought about him kissing Barnes afterward, those casual movements of love that he was only just beginning to take for granted.

He’d been able to take them for granted thus far.

She dialed Steve’s number.

He was panting lightly. “Hey, Nat, we’re just about to bring up the futon. Can I—”

“Do you ever do anything like hug Sansa without warning?” she asked without preamble.

“I don’t—I don’t think so? I don’t know. Why?”

“I just saw Sansa in the shower, and she has scarring that indicates very violent, probably recent, sexual abuse. I thought it was important that you know. Never bring this up, and do  _ not _ treat her like a space-alien, Steve.”

+++

Steve stared at the phone in his hand for a few seconds. This wouldn’t worry Bucky, usually, except that Steve’s eyes were wide and petrified like they hadn’t been since Bucky’d just come back and Steve was learning a lot about how horrible the world could be, mostly through Bucky.

If Steve was learning something new about how horrible the world was, it had to be really, really bad for him to be making that face again.

Bucky ran through possibilities like he was skimming a page for keywords of disaster. There could be an attack. Or somebody could be dead. Or somebody could be dying. Or some combination thereof. Or something much worse than any of those options.

“Steve,” he said. Steve didn’t respond. “Hey, Steve,” he said again, louder, and he decided he didn’t care that all the neighbors would see them: he grabbed Steve’s elbows and turned him so they were facing. “Come on, pal, what’s happening?” His voice was pretty level—years of practice—but it broke a little on  _ pal _ , which he’d called Steve in all manner of disaster situations before, all of which he’d dually feared and hoped might be the last one.

Steve directed his gaze at Bucky, but he didn’t appear to see him at all. “Somebody raped Sansa,” he said, “and Nat can tell just by seeing her naked.” And he sat down on the curb like his legs couldn’t support his weight anymore.

If you’d told Bucky that would be the news in advance, he probably would’ve taken it better: there was no crisis to be averted, no real  _ news  _ at all. Just history, and one he’d pretty much guessed. But hearing it said aloud sent a poisonous chill of despair through him all the same.

“Shit,” he said, and then, again, “shit.”

+++

Steve tried, with everything he had, not to show it. But when Sansa walked in, he felt something like a strike to his abdomen, razor-sharp and inexorable.

Sansa turned to speak to him, but stopped in her tracks when she saw his face. She turned utterly white. “What did Romanoff tell you,” she said.

“Nothing.”

“Are you going to lie to me” (Steve, for the first time, understood how she could command an army) “right now?”

“No. She said—she said she saw you naked.”

“Well,” Sansa replied, a brittle smile slowly replacing the damp rage of her expression. “It seems that you have a type, then, Steve.”

When Steve understood, he felt himself flush to the point of sweating, no matter the cold. Shame was a fever.

But grief was an icepick, and he still felt himself cold and hacked apart inside. “Sansa,” he said, helpless.

Her coat billowed as she turned and made for her bedroom. She shut the door behind her. When Steve tried to follow, Bucky grabbed his arm. “Sweetheart,” he said quietly, “you can’t.”

“I have to.”

Bucky stared at him for a minute. “Come with me,” he said, and pulled Steve outside.

Sansa was on the fire escape. Steve averted his eyes as Bucky dragged him down block after block, until they came to the diner where Steve had met Sansa. Ignoring the face Steve knew he was making, Bucky led him inside, nodding at the waiter as he squeezed them into the same side of a tucked-away booth.

Steve weighed having his raw, terrible face out in the open and making a spectacle of hiding it in his hands. He chose the latter. 

“Steve,” Bucky said, “look at me.”

Steve looked at him.

“I love you so much,” he said. Coffee appeared. Steve couldn’t make himself turn his head. “But you can’t do that,” Bucky continued. “You can’t.”

“What?”

“You can’t ask her for something.”

“I didn’t.”

“Steve,” Bucky repeated, “she’s not going to tell you it’s okay. She’s not going to tell you anything unless she decides to herself. Stolen people want what’s theirs. She gets to keep whatever from us, and she gets to make decisions about us.”

When Steve didn’t say anything, Bucky finished, quietly: “If I hadn’t known I could stay away forever, if I needed to, I wouldn’t have been able to come back.”

Steve’s whole self felt like a smarting wound.

He knew Bucky was right.

Bucky put his arm around Steve when he started to cry.

“You shouldn’t have to comfort me,” Steve said, between quiet sobs. They were very lucky the booth was secluded.

“Yeah, I should,” Bucky said thickly. “Brainwashing ain’t an exemption card.”

Steve’s throat did something horrible. He looked up: Bucky was crying too, though doing a much better job at containing it than Steve was.

“Oh, Buck,” Steve said. He fought the fresh wave of grief that came when he remembered how Bucky used to pull Steve’s hands off his back and chest. He remembered Bucky’s face the first time they’d almost-fucked after he came back— _ almost _ because Steve had stood up and apologized so many times he went a little hoarse, and Bucky went to the bathroom to vomit.

Bucky was clearing his throat. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll live.” He squeezed Steve’s hand. “Just be normal about it, alright? Until she brings it up. Even if she never brings it up.”

“Okay,” Steve said, and took deep breaths so his face wouldn’t stay red.

They both ordered pancakes.

+++

For hours, Sansa exited her body and entered the minds of rats, cats, birds, even a few dogs. In brief flashes of consciousness, she felt that she was hungry and thirsty and very cold. She made sure to end these flashes of consciousness before they distracted her. When she found what she was looking for, it was after midnight, and none of their working neighbors were out to see her climb down the fire escape.

She bore the cab ride to New Brighton by curling into the fetal position for its entirety. The driver seemed undisturbed. When they arrived, he asked her, “you sure this is you?”

Sansa looked up. The building appeared to be abandoned: windows boarded over, roof ripped half-away. “Yes,” Sansa said. “Thank you.” She handed him a hundred-dollar bill and stepped out.

The stairs swung and cracked as Sansa walked them, and Romanoff lived on the tenth floor. Sansa gripped the railing tightly and made her way up.

She decided to knock out of spite, though Romanoff certainly knew she was there already. Romanoff answered the door wearing an enormous sweater and no pants. “Fucking Rogers,” she said, in lieu of a greeting.

Sansa didn’t respond.

“Come inside.”

Sansa obliged, but didn’t step far across the threshold into the apartment. Marble seemed to cover every surface that wasn’t upholstered with white leather or surfaced with glass.

“I’m so sorry,” Romanoff said. “I’m so, so sorry.”

Sansa noticed a particularly elaborate chandelier. The ceilings seemed improbably high. Perhaps the apartment took up two floors of the building.

She felt Romanoff’s eyes on her face, assessing. “I’ve been through similar things.” Romanoff said, slowly, like the act of speaking those words hurt. “I overstepped, I know, but—”

“I know you’ve  _ been through similar things _ ,” Sansa said. She gestured around the apartment, out the window, at Romanoff herself. The medically constructed face, the compulsive privacy, the apartment like a parody of a real person’s. The gun Sansa knew was tucked into Romanoff’s sweater. “Look at yourself.”

Romanoff blinked at her. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I understand why you’re angry. You—“

“What kind of woman are you?”

“What?”

“We’ve all endured  _ similar things _ ,” Sansa said. “This was true for the mother of my mother of my mother, and a hundred mothers before. Let alone your mother, if you ever had one. It has always been true.” She felt her teeth grinding of their own volition and slackened the skin around them. “But you decided it didn’t apply to you.”

“Sansa,” Romanoff said.

“You are no kind of woman,” Sansa said. “Women lie for each other.”

Sansa met Romanoff’s eyes again. Without meaning to, her gaze had drifted to the chandelier as she spoke. Romanoff was composed; the only indication that she had even heard Sansa was an asymmetrical clench in her jaw.

“I will never break that pact,” Sansa said. “But I hope you meet someone who will. I hope someone does this to you.” For the first time since she started speaking, she fumbled. She didn’t wish that on Romanoff, not really, and Romanoff could sense it. It pierced the moment, and Sansa felt something deflate inside of her. Tears pricked annoyingly at the corners of her eyes.

Romanoff sighed. She had crossed her arms. “Well, I’m still sorry.”

They stood in silence.

“How did you find me, anyway?”

“Rats,” Sansa said.

Romanoff exhaled a sound distantly related to a laugh. “Figures.”

“I’m leaving now.”

“Okay.”

Sansa waited for the cab sitting on the curb. This time, in her backseat fetal position, she cried.

After another hundred dollars, another thank-you, she climbed back up the fire escape and slept, head resting against the window sill.

+++

“You’ve really been out here all night, huh.”

Sansa looked up: in the light of dawn and street lamps, Barnes was leaning out the window, box of cigarettes and matches clutched in his metal hand. He was, for once, wearing a shirt.

She turned away, silent.

“Mind if I join you?”

“I doubt I have a choice,” Sansa replied. He was, she imagined, raising his eyebrows.

“Okay,” he said, “I’m gonna take that as a yes,” and the platform creaked a warning as he settled next to Sansa, dangling his legs between the bars. He made a very noisy production of extracting a cigarette from the box. “Want one?” he asked. She didn’t respond. “Suit yourself,” he said, and lit up.

Barnes sat beside her in silence. After a moment, Sansa glanced at him again; he wasn’t looking at her. From the way he pursed his lips, she knew he was being careful not to blow smoke in her face. His shirt was short-sleeved and almost grotesquely tight, made from one of those fabrics that stretched in ways fabric wasn’t meant to, but the only visible tell that he had ever been wounded was his arm.

Sansa turned away. “You thought you were the only person like us, didn’t you,” she said, staring out at the white sky. "Or maybe not. You didn’t think at all.”

“I guess I didn’t,” Barnes said, turning to her. When Sansa didn’t look at him, he said, “hey, Stark,” and she met his eyes, keeping her face still. “Can I say something?”

“I doubt I have a choice,” she said, but this time, it was with less venom.

He half-smiled, then cleared his throat. Barnes looked—not nervous, exactly. He looked sad. It was a pure, calm sadness, the most vulnerable feeling she had ever seen on his face. “I used to want to leave after every time Steve and I had sex, because he always cried when he saw me shirtless. So I… well, you know,” he said. “Now he doesn’t cry about that anymore. And I don’t want to leave.”

Sansa looked away.

“Can I say something else?” Barnes asked.

“I doubt I have a choice,” she said a third time, all the malice now replaced by exhaustion.

Barnes laughed quietly, then sobered. “Steve’s a remarkable person,” he said. “He’s been living on the assumption that people are good for 35 years. So… It’s hard for him, when he’s wrong. That doesn’t mean he ain't trying.”

Sansa didn’t say anything for a moment. She watched an old couple walk across the street hand-in-hand. Neither of their coats looked particularly heavy, but they stood close, probably keeping each other warm that way.

“Could you tell him not to bring it up?” she asked.

Barnes smiled around his cigarette. “Kid, I told him not to bring it up 14 times in a row as soon as you went out.”

She smirked at that.

“Okay,” Barnes said after another minute, stubbing out his cigarette. “I want breakfast. And my balls are gonna freeze off out here.” Sansa wrinkled her nose. “What? It’s not like you can see my balls.” He stood up and stuck out a hand. “You coming?”

She didn’t take his hand, but she did stand. 

+++

When they went back in, Steve was in the living room, sitting on a box and staring dolefully into a huge cup of coffee. Sansa cut her eyes poisonously to Bucky. He made a gesture of surrender. “He wasn’t here when I went out,” he muttered.

Steve looked up. His face went through a rapid process of creasing and forcing itself to uncrease. “Uh,” he said, “hi. Hi. Good morning.”

It was like Bucky was in superpowered Hydra-brand Percocet withdrawal all over again. For someone who found it so hard to shut up most of the time, it took a lot to coax Steve into removing his foot from his mouth and returning to the land of the normally verbal.

“I’m buying a lottery ticket,” Bucky announced, starting to shrug on Steve’s jacket. But Sansa cut her eyes at him again. Bucky realized, with a small shock, that she didn’t want him to leave. Slowly, he hung the jacket back up on its hook, and instead went to make himself conspicuously busy in the kitchen.

Steve, somehow, had already produced dirty dishes. For once, Bucky thought,  _ thank god _ , instead of,  _ motherfucker _ : it gave him something noisy to do. He had to get water from one of the tanks they’d filled before the taps got shut off, too, which was even noisier.

Still, he heard their whole conversation, more or less. There wasn’t much talking. After a long pause that Bucky was glad he couldn’t see Steve’s face through, Sansa sighed and said, primly, “You can bring it up  _ once _ .” Steve sputtered for a minute, and then said, “thank you,” and then, “I’m so sorry.” Sansa replied, “you are forgiven,” which was probably a deliberately-missing-the-point dig, but the voice she said it in was friendly, for Sansa. Bucky’s shoulders relaxed.

Steve shuffled up next to him not long after. Bucky was frying bacon. “I’m already making you some, pig.”

“Actually, that’s the pig,” Steve replied, gesturing into the pan. Bucky huffed through his nose, giving Steve a very arch look out of the corner of his eye. Steve smiled at him, a little weakly.

“Sorted it?” Bucky said, voice low.

“I think so,” Steve said quietly.

Bucky glanced back up at Steve, who didn’t looked wrecked anymore, but who seemed more exhausted than ever. Bucky gave him a peck. “Good,” he said.

“I know.”

“I swear, if you feel too bad about feeling too bad about this, I’ll tell Sansa she should unforgive you.”

Steve swatted at him, but rubbed his shoulder briefly, warmly, before he retreated to the living room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GoT canon-typical (so, fairly graphic) discussion of the aftermath of sexual assault and torture. specifically, scarring related to the two. also, discussion of what happens when those around a person find out that the person has experienced sexual violence.


	5. mini-chapter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> mini chapter here folks

Sansa dreamed a memory. She was in Winterfell, still a child in body. In her dreams, she looked as she did when she was thirteen. Each time she woke up she startled at the weight of her breasts, like a ghast had been straddling her in the night.

She was walking with Robb and Theon. Theon strutted, shirtless and well-balanced, in the cold of a damp summer.

“Gods be good,” she said to him. “Put on a shirt.”

“Hey, the women here want to know what they’re getting.” Robb elbowed him in the ribs. “Can you think with your head—“

“I’m thinking with a different head.”

“Sansa,” said Robb, “go find Bran. You’re not old enough for Theon’s gross damned opinions.”

“I can handle his going about like a tomcat in spring,” she said, and then looked at a smiling Theon. “Septa Mordane said my first blood’ll be soon. Then you’ll have to mind me.”

And then Theon was Bucky, strutting shirtless. “Ironborn don't mind little girls, blood or no blood.” 

“Blood or no blood,” said Theon, limping next to her. 

It wasn’t a bad dream, really, but Sansa woke up shivering and grasping at deflated lungs.


	6. Almost a Year Later

Time moved differently here. It rushed, tripping and stumbling, as if it had somewhere more important to be. The winter had faded to spring and then to a hot, damp summer. And now the air was drying, and the trees were killing and dropping their leaves to prepare for yet another winter. How hard it must be, thought Sansa, on the bodies of the trees. To ready themselves for winter over and over, piling leaves around them, barely green again before another winter started. 

The otherworld arranged their time in small increments--six hours between dawn and noon, twelve between high sun and high moon. They tracked years by the sun instead of the moon, so that even the moon was rushed in filling itself twelve times in 365 days. 

Sansa kept her own time. She watched the tenth moon begin to wax. When it was the size of a fingernail clipping, she would menstruate, so she walked to the bodega close to her home and bought tampons alongside her daily purchase: two bananas, cigarettes for Bucky, and inexpensive cakes called “butterscotch-krimpets”. 

The girl who worked there lusted after her. Her name was Selina, and she had cropped pink hair. She had not yet become a woman, in character at least, though she was seventeen years old. Sometimes, girls matured as slowly as boys. Arya was eighteen years of age, but she still acted childishly. Nineteen, Sansa corrected herself. Her nameday must have already past, even in this land of short and frequent winters. 

“That’ll be fourteen dollars,” said Selina. 

“Twenty, actually.” Sansa had money to spare, and she was uninterested in courting this pink-haired child. 

“You forgot to factor in the friend discount.”

Sansa thanked her and handed the girl her credit card. There was a silence, as Sansa neatly packed her things into her satchel. 

“Pants!” Selina exclaimed. “You don’t normally wear them.” she paused for a moment. “They look good.”

Sansa thanked her, retrieved her card, and made her way home.  

++++ 

Barnes claimed to participate in what he and Romanoff found it hilarious to call “the murder gig economy.” It seemed, however, that any mission he chose, he believed in. Most of them involved killing, capturing, or surveilling members of the group that had tortured him. Some involved doing the same to groups that had tortured others.

This mission wasn’t like that, not exactly. Sansa occasionally found Romanoff Skyping a very beautiful and round woman named Ziyou about it. Ziyou said things like “is he good with babies? It’s okay if he’s too assassinny for babies. He can just give them  _ Angry Birds _ . That’s what I did when I sucked at Korean.” Sansa wished she could say this didn’t pique her curiosity, but she wanted to know if these “angry birds” were, perhaps, a dig at her own revenge methods—was Natasha spreading that? Damn her—and so she asked Barnes who Ziyou was.

Barnes looked up from the iPad, brow knit. “The fuck’ve you been spying on me for?”

“I spy on everyone.” Barnes looked as though he were preparing for one of his brief, oath-heavy polemics, so she changed tack. “Romanoff spoke to her.”

“Oh, spying on my best friend,  _ that’s  _ better,” Barnes said, rolling his eyes, but his voice conveyed that it was, in fact, significantly better. “She’s one of our contacts for North Korea.” 

Sansa wished their home would accommodate JARVIS. He was a kind spirit, and he understood a great many things. Sansa resolved to ask Tony about the circumstances that Jarvis needed in order to occupy a home. 

++++

Tony had the avengers (aside from Nat, she was off doing something personal and very violent) over, mostly because they all refused to watch “Godless” on their own time. Sansa was there too, but she spent intermittent hours in the bathroom. Normally, when she was nervous, she left, so Tony texted JARVIS. 

**What’s up with sansa?**

**She is well. She enjoys asking me questions.**

Tony was relieved. It was always nice when she was doing something odd instead of distressing. 

+++

Sansa was speaking with Jarvis. “What do you do when you don’t have anyone to help?” The spirit took a few moments to respond:

“I monitor Tony’s behavior and vital signs,” he said. “Sometimes, I will read new articles on human anatomy.”

“Do you love him?”

“I am an AI system, Lady Sansa.” Jarvis was the only one who called her a lady anymore. It was nice.

“Fine, fine. But love isn’t a feeling, it’s doing right by someone. It’s a duty.”

“How cynical.”

Sansa laughed. “You’re the spirit without feelings. I must be damned cynical.”

“Not a spirit---”

“--An AI, I know. But a spirit is just a being without a single body.” 

“There are many conflicting opinions about spirits.”

“Mmm.” 

Sansa sat in silence, legs crossed on the small bench in the shower. The bench was for making love, Sansa knew. Once, she had accidentally made it vibrate. She’d sat on it for a few moments, warm at the thought of Natasha Romanoff freeing her breasts from their elastic constraints. Sansa was lucky that Jarvis couldn't read minds. 

Later, she asked Tony how to invite Jarvis into her home. 


	7. Collateral Damage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sansa awoke to chill and damp. Her face, arm, and hip were pressed against cold filth. She tried to sit, but her hands were cuffed, and she was in such darkness that she was afraid to breathe.

Bucky’s phone wailed with old war sirens. They sounded different now--only slightly, but different. Steve and Bucky met eyes. This must be Tony.

Bucky picked up his phone. It was. Tony said, in one breath, “Hydra wants bucky and bruce. Government vans are on the way. Just--just fucking get in them, okay.”

“But Sansa’s out!”

“Where?”

“She said she was going to the Met.”

“Okay, okay, I get the medieval thing, but why in _all fuck_ doesn’t she have her phone--

“--How do you know that--”

“--I just do, okay, and I’m not big brother, and I’m not gonna let Hydra take any of you, so would you _please just get ready.”_

“Fine, fine. But you’re gonna find Sansa.”

“I swear to God.”

Sansa must have left traces of herself here, Steve thought distantly. She would have made Tony swear on something he believed in. And then the vans were here, black bulls with shining eyes, and Steve took Bucky’s hand as they climbed in.

\------

Sansa awoke to chill and damp. Her face, arm, and hip were pressed against cold filth. She tried to sit, but her hands were cuffed, and she was in such darkness that she was afraid to breathe. Noiselessly and for an indeterminable time, she managed to sit.

Upon capture, she knew, it is best to be silent. So she was. She breathed as slowly as she could, but whatever grime she had been laying on had filled her right nostril.

Soon, an old woman shined a bright light onto her face and body. “She’s awake,” she said, and nearly fifty men and women emerged, clicking with the cold light of electric bulbs.

The old woman addressed her. She looked like a decomposing apple wrapped in blankets, but her eyes were hard and her voice was strong. “My name is Goca,” she said. Her accent was hard to place. “And you are Sansa Stark, no?”

“Yes.” There was no point in lying. “Are you Hydra?”

The crowd behind her murmured indignantly. “No, child,” said Goca. “No, we are the victims of Hydra. And we won’t hurt you.” Goca surveyed Sansa’s face. Sansa met her eyes and made no expression. The old woman softened, eyes crinkling, and wiped the mud from Sansa’s face with a handkerchief.

And then she sank, sighing, into a squat. “Your friend, Barnes,” she said slowly. “You don’t know him.”

Goca spoke of a time when she was a young mother. Bucky had been sent into dozens of Ukrainian villages, murdering all men and boys to prevent future rebellion. He pulled Goca’s son, a child of ten, from her arms and shot him. Pieces of his skull landed on her face.

Four more women had the same story--poor villages razed of men. One man could not speak, so he wrote on a small notepad:

 

 

> When I was child, Mother hide me from Barnes under floor, nails floorboards in place above me. Barnes kill her. I am under the floor so long, can’t move, so dark. Rats eat me. I am so weak, they think I am dead already.

The people behind Goca each told stories of similar horror. Sansa nodded, unspeaking. She tried to cry a little, out of respect. The students of a Chinese highschool were lined up and shot, all but one, who hid under their rotting bodies for days in fear that Bucky would come back. Finally, she shed some quiet tears, and found that she could not stop.

Some were tortured deliberately. Most, accidentally. “We are the collateral damage,” Goca said, “Of people letting that _creature_ live.” She wiped the tears and snot from Sansa’s face, gently. Her loose skin and stories made sansa think of Old Nan. She continued to weep. Goca unlocked her wrists. It wasn’t as if she had anywhere to run.

“Do you see, child?” She said. Sansa silently tallied the fears and angers of each person. “He was tortured, yes, but that does not mean he could not choose otherwise. He could choose to die. He could choose to spare _one child._ ” Goca exhaled. “Nobody would have noticed. Hydra wouldn’t have noticed, if he did that.” The old woman ran her hand down the middle of her face, loose skin shifting around her palm. “He was tortured, and that’s the only reason he did those things. We do understand that. But his past is a reason. It is not an excuse.”

Goca waited for her to speak. She did not, weeping mutely into her sleeve. Finally, Goca stood, stroked her hair, and said, “So now you understand why we need to find him. We need you to find him.”

“What?”

“We’ve read your files, Lady Sansa Stark. We know that you found all five of Natasha Romanoff’s safehouses. Now, we need you to find Barnes.”

Sansa nodded, still silent. Still scanning the room for animals or exits. But she was coming upon a greater realization. These were good people, and there was no way to protect herself and her new family without harming them.


	8. Chapter 8

It disturbed Sansa how easily this knowledge came to her: she would turn these people against each other. They already armed her with their own fear and rage.

Somewhere, Cersei Lannister scoffed at their lack of foresight. “Some idiocy,” she would say, “for them to know such brutality and then steal a woman with their arses hanging out.” The room was dark, and every member of Goca’s group was armed. Sansa could do this.

“I’m going to warg, now.” She told Goca.

The old woman reached out and touched her face. Her eyes were damp. “God bless you.”

“My gods aren’t here.”

Then Sansa slipped into a seagull and quickly surveyed the area. They were holding her in an enormous metal storage container, well padlocked.

So she entered a rat and searched along its outer walls for openings. There was only one, littered with traps. The silent man must be more afraid of rats than Sansa had previously thought.

She navigated her tiny body through them, shifting each trap with with weak rodent-hands. And then she slipped into the darkness of the container, left the rat to run about, and sent nine more in after it. Sansa left the last rat near the silent man’s feet and returned to her body.

“What did you see?” Said Goca. “Tell me, child.”

Sansa inhaled. “I’m not going to help you.” She said. Nobody in the room spoke, or even moved.  

“I know the way you feel, believe me, I know more than most. And I’m not Steve Rogers. I don’t think he’s innocent, or even close. Suffering is neither excuse nor redemption. But I won’t help you kill him.”

The room buzzed with shock and anger in languages Sansa could not understand. Goca squatted next to her, wrinkling with shifting thought, and spoke. “Why?” She pulled her hand across her face again. “After everything you know. That man deserves justice.”

"Justice?" Sansa was angry, now. "After all of your suffering, you still think people  _get what they deserve?"_   She had beheaded deserters out of solemn duty, savored Ramsey and Littlefinger's deaths with sadistic glee. Not justice. "You don't want to protect the innocent, you don't want to rid your people of threat. You want to kill Bucky because killing him will feel good."

Goca’s face grew hard. “Is that how you excuse complicity? You don't get to tell me that I'm avenging my son  _for fun,_ you snotty cunt." 

“Complicit in what? Everything that happened to you happened while I was in my world. And Barnes hasn’t harmed anyone since then.”

Goca hit her, hard, across the face.

First there was heavy silence. Then there was commotion--different languages overlapping, shouting, spitting. Sansa knew what they were debating. It was time to torture her, to break her into doing this. She had prepared herself for this eventuality, she reminded herself.

Sansa tried to breathe slowly. But when she was preparing, she had imagined soil beneath her, tangled with roots and gods. Not like this. Her lungs were shrinking. Not like this, where her blood would slide across the metal floors of this cube, where it could leak from the single small hole only to dry on concrete. The earth could not absorb her pain. Whatever gods slept in the otherworld’s ground would not hear her. Ramsay licked her ear. Men and women began beating her, with boots and fists and duct-taped barbed wire. When she screamed, it was real. 

She tried to warg, but pain tethered her to her breaking body. She was forced onto the floor, her wrist pulled flat against metal. Goca stepped on her fingers. They broke. She screamed. 

And then the old woman stopped, her face changing at a remarkable speed. She looked again like a kind, rosy apple. No. Like she had skinned a sweet-faced babushka to use as a mask. “Please,” said the old woman. “Please, reconsider--” And then Sansa warged into a rat and bit the silent man. He screamed and fired in blind terror. Goca fell.

“Continue!” she shouted from the ground. “It’s just my shoulder.” But two other men were bleeding, too, one from the stomach. And the silent man sat, banging his head against the wall.

Sansa lifted her mangled hands against her chest, approached Goca, and knelt. “You need an ambulance, now. I won’t let any harm come to him, I won’t tell anyone, and he’s bleeding out.” The corners of Goca’s mouth lifted.

Goca laughed. “Will _you_ let him die, hmm? Or will you find Barnes before that poor one,” she gestured, “Bleeds out?”

“What?”

“He goes to the hospital when Barnes is dead. Not before. Better hurry, Sansa Stark.”  

The room exploded into dissent. Sansa spoke. "Your leader," she addressed the crowd, "Would leave you all to die." Sansa began to gather the blood and viscera around her. "She is a coward, and she has abandoned you." 

Goca pulled a gun from between her shawls and pointed it at Sansa. She inhaled, exhaled, and remembered how to break a person, how to break her, with the fluidity and comfort of Ramsay Bolton. She began to gather blood and viscera around her, piling blood and skin into her hands. 

“What was your son’s name?" She asked Goca. 

“Dmitri. He was a good boy.”

“And when the Winter Soldier shot Dmitri,” Sansa whipped her arm back and threw the blood and skin onto Goca’s face. She gasped, open-mouthed and blinded. “Did he taste like this?”

She roared, lurching at Sansa before crumbling. Sansa stood. “Where is the key.” Goca moaned. “The key,” Sansa repeated.

Goca kicked off her left boot. The key was inside.

Before Sansa left, she spoke to the frozen-faced people still in the box. “You saw,” she announced, “that I am a keeper of my word. Call an ambulance. There will be no more vengeance.”


	9. Meanwhile

Fourteen men in black suits brought them underground. Not just suits, Bucky reminded himself. Well-tailored grey-black wool. What else would Sansa say about what they wore? Hand-stitching? Some sort of llama fleece? There had to be something there, in the cloth or the lack of synthetic fibers that could tell him.

Bucky felt a perverse half-chuckle rise out of him. He squeezed Steve’s hand. “I should have spent more time being queer,” he whispered.

“What?” Steve did not let go. He was sweating, eyes flickering, crushing Bucky’s hand like a collar-press.

“There’s probably something about what these guys are wearing. Tailoring, fabric, the shit allsorts Sansa knows about clothes.”

“She can tell what they’re wearing.” Steve said, face hard. “They’re probably wearing the same thing at her safehouse.”

Nat gave Bucky a look. The look meant: does he actually believe that? Bucky nodded: kind of. He’s trying to.

“Bulletproof jackets, dumbasses.” She said aloud. “That’s the hidden significance.” She spat. “That and the fact they took my backup gun.”

Tony walked before them, pestering the agents. Bucky heard him say “--where, _exactly_ , is she kept safe” and then “--funding the whole fucking US military, thats why--”

Steve kept his eyes locked on the stairwell in front of him. Nat walked in precise rhythm with the agents, hiding her footfalls. And then a door opened before them of its own volition.

“Please go inside,” said one of the men.

Steve stopped, turning to face them. “Not until you prove Sansa’s safe.” Fucking Steve. He and Tony were doing the same goddamn thing, expecting these men to treat them like people. Important people. Important people don’t mean shit in underground bunkers.

“Steve, shut--” The men turned and opened fire on them. Steve charged like a bear in slow-motion before falling.

+++++++

Nat awoke first and immediately vomited. Blood ran down behind her ear. Concussion. Concussion and barbiturates and benzodiazepines in birdshot pellets. She took blurry stock of the room. Concrete walls, newly painted. Steve, Bucky, and Tony unconscious. A couch, and a skinny uniformed kid crouched atop it.

“You’re not supposed to be up yet,” he said. “How come you ain’t asleep?”

“What’s the camo for? You’re not gonna blend with the foliage in here.”

“‘S my uniform.”

Nat felt for head wounds. There was a bowling ball rolling around in her skull. “Insightful.” She said, and then reached out her hand. “First aid.”

“Let me do it.”

“First aid kit, in my hand, now.”

“They said I shouldn't give you anything that could be used as a weapon.” The kid looked at her. His face was less blurry and more scared. “They wouldn't even let me bring a gun because you’d get it. Like, sneak-attack.”

Natasha scrubbed at her eyes. “The only people in this room,” she said, “Are unconscious, pubescent, and me. So I’m going to need that first aid kit.”

“I’m twenty-seven.”

“Congratulations.” The concussion was not severe. Nat decided to drop the subject. She had more important things to ask.

**Author's Note:**

> warnings for the work as a whole: pretty graphic violence, internalized lotsofthings, referenced past torture and sexual abuse (low-detail), the US government being pretty atrocious, drug use. if you have any specific questions or ideas on how to warn better here, let us know!


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